Description
Artwork info
“Tania’s room lies empty. Steve and Olive Christian’s only daughter’s room in their sprawling home, Big Fence, is now left untouched. Like a time capsule, it is filled with the accoutrements of childhood.
A Princess and the Pea stack of mattresses sit in the room’s centre, still partially made up with pink sheets. In Tania’s room the absence is felt – a girl’s room rendered in dusty pastel tones, heavily gendered, abandoned on the brink of adulthood, never to be returned to. A youth forgotten.
On Pitcairn the age demographics are worrying for the island’s future. There are just a handful of individuals aged between 0 and 45. It was no wonder that I was referred to as being of the “only woman of breeding age”.
Today it is not child abuse that concerns the island, but rather a bleak future of continual decline and a non-existent birth rate.” – Rhiannon Adam
_
CONTACT | tom@opendoors.gallery
_
_
Big Fence / Pitcairn Island
The Pitcairn Islands are the last British Overseas Territory in the South Pacific. Pitcairn was permanently settled by the infamous Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian captives in 1790, and their descendents, now numbering fewer than 40, still live there today.
The tiny, isolated, volcanic island measures just two by one miles, is 400 nautical miles away from its nearest neighbour, and is the least populated jurisdiction in the world. Due to the infrequent supply ship schedule (the island’s only direct access), Rhiannon Adam was trapped on Pitcairn for three months, spending two of those living at Big Fence… READ MORE
_
_
Artist Bio
Rhiannon Adam is a photographic artist, born in Cork, Ireland, in 1985. She currently lives and works between London and the US.
In 1992, her parents sold everything they owned and bought a live-aboard sailing boat, Jannes. From that point, her childhood became nomadic, moving from place to place, mainly around South America and the Caribbean. She eventually moved to London as a teenager to live her with aunt, enabling her to begin mainstream education. She later studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and at the University of Cambridge.
Adam’s work is centred on research-based, long-form, social documentary projects that make use of analogue photographic processes and archive materials, as well as her on-going obsession with Polaroid and the materiality of the photographic image. Her early life experiences have had a lasting influence on her work, with a focus on remote communities, the concept of utopia, and the fine line between fact and fiction… READ MORE
_
