Lot 87: MARK NEVILLE

Newborn Lamb from Fancy Pictures
Signed and dated in ink on a label affixed to the reverse of the frame. Number 5 from an edition of 8 plus 2 artist's proofs.

101.6 x 127 cm (40 x 50 in).

Colour coupler print, flush-mounted.

2008

Isle of Bute, Mount Stuart House, Fancy Pictures, 11 May – 30 September 2008; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Longside Gallery, The Gathering: Building the Arts Council
Collection 1973–2009, 5 March–18 April 2010; Newcastle upon Tyne, The Hatton Gallery, Another Face: the genre of portraiture re-imagined, 3 December 2010–19 February 2011 (each another example exhibited)

Interview with David Brittain, Source, Autumn 2009

Private Collection, Europe

Mark Neville was commissioned in 2008 to produce work for the Visual Arts Programme run by Mount Stuart, a grand nineteenth-century Gothic Revival house on the Isle of Bute on the west coast of Scotland. His project Fancy Pictures consisted of a 16mm film, an audio-slide installation of still photographic work, and a group of four photographic prints displayed in the main House, of which Newborn Lamb was one.

“[The] positioning of [the four photographic prints] within the House acts to question the role of social documentary photography, both its relation to context and dissemination, and how it at once celebrates and manipulates its subjects. The images reference the House’s relationship to painting sometimes through the poses of its subjects, which may seem to echo Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs. Andrews, or sometimes through the lighting, which might quote Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus. However, they simultaneously also refer to the impulse in 1920’s social documentary photography, later common in Soviet pictorial types, to orchestrate its subjects into stylized compositions that glorify the relationship between people and the land. The suggestion being, that it is people, not machines, that are the source of a country’s wealth. This message is counterbalanced with the contradictory references to painting genres which reinforce the idea that power is a result of land ownership, and that images should foremost be aesthetically pleasing in order to communicate. I hope the result is ambiguous.” Mark Neville

Another print of this image is held in the collection of the Arts Council of England, and the Mount Stuart Trust, Isle of Bute, Scotland.