Recent Works: Political Commentary, War & Migration, the Pandemic
Petherbridge has been producing drawings related to issues of war and destruction since the 1970s. The Iron Siege of Pavia,
1973-5 (private collection, Virginia USA) and The Concrete Armada, 1978 (Manchester Art Gallery) were precursors to the many
works about aggression that followed in the wake of the Falklands War. The multi-panelled works commenting on the dreadful conflicts in Syria and the Middle East,
The Destruction of the City of Homs, 2016 (Tate Britain) and The Destruction of Palmyra, 2017 were
exhibited in London in September-October 2017 with a catalogue commentary by Petherbridge, ‘Destruction and Graphic Strategies of Excess’ www.artspacegallery.co.uk/BOOKS/Deanna2017/index.html
Recent multi-panelled drawings from 2018 and 2019 deal with the hazardous passage of political and economic migrants across oceans and continents
to the horrors of displacement camps. Attempts to stem these migrations, such as Donald Trump’s ‘big beautiful wall’, Hungary’s border barriers
or the concept of Fortress Britain embedded within Brexit demagoguery are profoundly irrational in the face of the seamless interconnectivity of
cyberspace and global surveillance capitalism.
In the 2019 diptychs, City on the Edge of the Abyss,Crossing the Abyss, and Dislocated Institutions, the intention is to evoke a commentary on the profound social insecurities of the UK through the deployment of discomforting visual allusions and irrational perspectives.
The 2020 diptychs deal with lock-down and contemplation of the Coronavirus pandemic.
The drawing On Shifting Sands: Viewing History is a response to the Black Lives Matter campaign.
