Francesca Maffeo Gallery is pleased to present ‘Big Fence / Pitcairn Island ’ by Rhiannon Adam, the first exhibition from our ‘Season of Women Photographers’.

Adam’s journey and documentation of her stay on the remote island of Pitcairn is a powerful and unsettling exploration of a ‘Paradise Lost’. ‘Big Fence / Pitcairn Island’ is the first in-depth photographic project to take place on the island.

In 2015, Adam travelled to the remote island community of Pitcairn, the last British overseas territory in the South Pacific. The island measures just two miles by one mile, today just one child and 42 islanders remain, descendants from the Mutiny on the Bounty. In 2004, the island’s romantic image was tarnished by a string of high profile sexual abuse trials; as a result, islanders are particularly reticent about accepting outsiders. With her trip duration dictated by the quarterly supply vessel, there would be no way off for three arduous months. 

Expired Polaroid film is used to capture the fragility of the place - its instability echoing the scarred underbelly of the island, its dreamlike quality capturing the whimsy of the legend. Images of empty rooms, rock fissures, objects, audio snippets, relics and damaged found photographs of long departed islanders sit alongside formal portraits, intermingling to capture the spirit and struggle of this tiny island nation as it sits on the brink of implosion.

Please join us for a drink and a Bounty Bar from 6pm on April 20th. The exhibition runs until June 9th.