The found images Kate Woods uses as a starting point for her works are familiar to us all from old calendars and tourist brochures. They celebrate the picturesque landscapes of picture postcards, requiring nothing more than a glance at their surface. Woods (literally) deconstructs these pictures and what she re-creates from them is intended to provoke and challenge. She takes the familiar and turns it inside out.

By deliberately dismantling and re-building her ‘landscapes’, Kate Woods references the landscape interventions of the avant-garde Land Art movement that developed in the late 1960s. Rather than examining the real-life effects of time and place however, Woods creates works that cannot be tied to any particular temporal or physical environment. Recalling Brent Wong’s starkly surreal, object-filled landscapes of the 1970s, they are half-remembered locations stage-managed by an unseen hand.

Vaguely Modernist constructions appear against backdrops of faded mountain scenery or a tinted cityscape In Kosmaj and Sanski. Recalling the futuristic design imagined by Sputnik creators or sci-fi writers in the 1950s, they elicit a sense of déjà vu, but this is again subverted by the artist as these constructions exist nowhere but in these works. Woods documents something which does not exist in the present and has not existed in the past.

In Double Lake faceted shapes form portals through which another world is glimpsed. When peering through these ‘wormholes’ the viewer expects to see the wondrous, the frightening, the alluring, but Woods defies these expectations. The brave new world she portrays is the same old world: seasons are skewed, horizons altered, subjects manipulated but the images are easily recognisable as ‘same-same but different’. This eerie familiarity gets under the skin, simultaneously unnerving and attracting the viewer.