Conceptual artist Elspeth Diederix is Dutch, yet was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1971. Diederix and her family moved often, living in Africa, Columbia, and the Netherlands because her father worked for the Dutch embassy. She graduated in 1995 from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and was awarded the Prix de Rome in 2002. Her interest in photography was a result of being exposed to such amazingly disparate landscapes as a child and her interest in art history and painting. Her photographs are infiltrated with elements of the fantastic. In an image titled Virginia, a woman submerges her face into a duckweed covered pond; her simple, yet bizarre action reminds viewers of a traveler's entrance into a new, unknown world. Unsettling events occur in common surroundings. Diederix plays with strange effects of light and shape in her work, yet uses no digital manipulation. The artist often resorts to suspending objects from clear fishing line to create different environments.
I first came across Elspeth Diederix's work when looking at a collection of the Prix de Rome winner's artwork. I was immediately taken aback by an image of a woman dipping her fingers into a cup of coffee at a cafe. The woman's nonchalance is unsettling; her face and body posture suggest that nothing out of the ordinary is occurring. If might just be that she is fishing a spent bag of tea out of her cup, but the image set my imagination aglow. The same sense of the fantastic is alive in all of her photos. I appreciate her work all the more knowing that she creates all of the effects in camera. I always try to stage everything exactly before the camera so that those posing in the composition have a sense of the atmosphere of the completed image.
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