Go Make! - Nonsense on Stilts

This video installation is a joint commission between Dada-South and Lighthouse and forms part of Dada-South's Go Make! Programme and Lighthouse's Digital and Moving Image Arts Commissioning Programme. The installation was exhibited at Lighthouse Arts and Training in Brighton in July 2007.   

Gruhn's photographs predominantly investigate the prosthesis as an object. Maintaining a photographic approach, her inspiring moving image piece focuses on the body which the prosthesis completes. The mutilated body can be seen as challenging to the viewer. Critics of Mark Quinn's sculpture of Alison Lapper, Pregnant, in Trafalgar Square dismissed the work as "ugly" or even "horrible" (BBC News, 19/9/05).

Gruhn understands this challenge to be a confrontation with ones own vulnerability and mortality and sources the root of such reactions on the basis of Julia Kristeva's essay about abjection. Kristeva speaks about "...a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between subject and object or between self and other."

Gruhn's work has been described as gently unsettling with a slightly macabre edge, displaying affinity with surrealist ideas and set in context with concepts such as the Other and the Uncanny. Often aspects of a mild form of sarcasm become apparent.

About the Artist

Having completed a BA (Hons) in photography at the Art Institute at Bournemouth in 2004, Gruhn's work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in England and Washington, USA. Recently she took part in New Art Birmingham, an event showcasing the best emerging regional, national and international contemporary visual artists. Gruhn's work has also been exhibited as part of the Abilities Arts Festival in Toronto.