Martine Corompt - Land of the Lost

The tree people from Martine Corompt's Land of the Lost are perplexing. Not quite humourous in the tradition of caricature, and not uncanny or mysterious like the quasi-European forests of Disney - they are remnants of the romantic notion of the 'common man' as rustic and earthy, somehow connected to their environment. Though paradoxically, these figures seem more 'disconnected', like strays or wanderers from an overzealous site of street planning or urban renewal. In combining tree and person (man and nature) Corompt points to the human tendency of anthropomorphism and our attempts to understand ourselves in relation to 'nature'. Corompt uses vinyl wall illustrations and video to explore this slippage between background/foreground, landscape/subject.