Catherine Jacobs and Marcia Teusink

For this E8 Arts and Craft Trail, Hackney-based artists Catherine Jacobs and Marcia Teusink present ‘Shifting Terrains & Changing Contexts’ at The Stow Brothers in Hackney Central. Working across photography, painting, video and objects, the artists explore landscape and historic plant specimens in ways that invite us to consider what happens when one’s sense of place shifts and becomes uncertain, strange and sometimes sublime.

Jacobs is intrigued by how photography is inherently an ambiguous medium. Working with experimental processes, she makes open-ended works as a focus for our subjective responses. Using a close up-lens and careful lighting, she transforms sticky, domestic materials into abstract landscapes. Inviting us into playful states of uncertainty, her work is informed by her parallel career in research psychology.

Teusink explores the historic movement of plants – a subject she began to research after learning about Hackney’s historic Loddiges Nursery several years ago. The plant business was responsible for the import and export of thousands of plant species around the globe, with great success and also some negative repercussions. Her pieces look at both the care early botanists gave to plants and the complications inherent to moving species around the world.