Both flesh and not #1

In each of Zoe Croggon's photo collages, she distils the beauty of the moving body into a static image. Her images are taken from printed sources such as sports encyclopaedias, dance catalogues and architectural magazines. The collages convey the elusiveness of the static form in fast-paced sports such as tennis and basketball. Croggon combines the flat, simplified shapes and empty spaces of modernism with fragments of the competitors during play. The players themselves are indefinable, an arm, a foot or a hand is transformed into a compositional element and elongated shadows execute actions in pictorial space that has already been exited by the performers themselves?it is as though they are too fast to capture. Croggon's focus on the players' shadows make us reflect on their supernatural speed and agility. The thematic of the shadow also gives rise to more philosophical thoughts about the individual in sport: whether her legacy will remain, or fade. The subject of Croggon's film is the barehanded, or weapon-less, routine of a Chinese martial arts wushu student. Viewers are presented with the student's angular, precise movements in a spare architectural environment, the focus being the rhythm and flow of his body through space. Croggon investigates how we create order and meaning via the process of perception. The communicative power of her work relies on the viewer's compulsion to make connections between things at a subconscious level.