Sean Rafferty

Sean Rafferty's recent projects have developed from constructs of landscape in painting, film, and cardboard packaging. Landscape in Rafferty’s projects is used as a device to convey, or project onto, anxieties about choice, time, and truth.

Fugitive Dreams (Road Pictures) (2011) observed the film genre of the Road Movie and identified its use of rapid movement through a broad landscape as an illusion of freedom. In The Arcadia Project (2010) hundreds of depictions of fruits and vegetables were cut from cardboard fruit boxes to create a hyper-landscape. The work referenced the Walter Benjamin palimpsest The Arcades Project alongside Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego to describe the spectre of death that infiltrates our commodification and idealised renderings of the landscape. Monuments of Fiction (2013) is an ongoing project which is essentially a composition of salvaged fragments from the farm of Rafferty's late grandparents. The work takes, both literally and figuratively, elements from a sculptural work by Rafferty's grandfather to compose an elegy to him and his passing as the central figure within a landscape of myths and ruins.