Lana de Jager - 'Editions' Featured Artist

Wednesday 12 - Sunday 23 February 2020

Click here for artwork by Lana de Jager

The tension of zoom and scale.

Zooming into parts of objects or changing the scale and proportion of objects relative to each other creates a tension that complicates the viewer’s expected understanding of those objects. Artists have employed this as a way of narration for a very long time and it is instinctive for de Jager to use this approach to monumentalise the mundane in her work, possibly because she comes from a design and advertising background. De Jager habitually examines how scale might elaborate on the meaning in her work or how it might affect the impact of the message.

When she started out, the artist was creating solar plates under a UV lamp in her home studio, with a maximum size of A4. Humans compare scale to our bodies, as we often feel ourselves to be at the centre of the visible world, so conveying scale on such a small plate was difficult. More recently, de Jager was able to explore how scale influences the viewing experience when the plate and sheet sizes are quadrupled – and a far more physical experience was added to the aesthetic enjoyment: peeling a large sheet from several plates that might have moved adds great drama to the already exciting print making process.