Seven Trees / Poster
Dubai, UAE, 2019
by Polly Tootal
Dubai's workers, enticed with a false promise of prosperity, are brought into labour camps to accommodate the city's high volume of infrastructural development. Depicting the non-place – unidentifiable corners, a tree, fence, signpost – the picture shows the quotidian landscape to describe the mostly unfinished infrastructure present in these spaces. The place has an ephemeral feeling, the workers exist in the finite, serving their purpose and then disappearing. But there is more construction, more labour camps being built, multiplying, suggesting no end to the growth. The intense rational reality is set against the bizarre beauty of the huge skies with their dreamlike clarity of colour.
Specifications:
Size 18x24″ open edition
Digital print on 189 gsm matt paper
Giclée print quality
Unframed
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Polly Tootal’s photography has emerged out of a continual exploration of the possibilities of space between a variety of extremes; theatre/reality, the contemporary world mirroring history, transience/permanence, the bizarre in the banal.
Tootal’s ongoing topographic project Somewhere In England began in 2010 and is an exploration of undisclosed, anonymous landscapes in the U.K. Shooting mainly at dawn or twilight, these public places devoid of people appear otherworldly. Within the images she attempts to present a cultural critique on contemporary social issues whilst highlighting the idiosyncrasies of public space and illuminating the non-descript landscape in these large-scale works.
Concerned with how contemporary geopolitics restrict and displace different societal groups due to poverty and injustice - her work focuses on liminal zones, the outskirts of cities where urban and infrastructure meet, highlighting the chaos and control that power forces upon populations and the environment.
