Sean O'Hagan 

Running Wild review – eerie images of a girls-only world

Frances Kearney's strange and beautiful photographs are a kind of conceptual meditation on childhood, says Sean O'Hagan
  
  

frances kearney running wild
Little girl lost? One of the images of the inside of a polytunnel. Photograph: Frances Kearney Photograph: Frances Kearney

"In Frances Kearney's extraordinary photographs – which appear at once utterly unstaged and wholly composed – we are invited to think again about what kind of world the child can make in a world so determinedly made by adults." So writes the psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips, in his introduction to Running Wild, a book of photographs that make a up a kind of conceptual meditation on childhood. Kearney is part of a generation of photographers that came though the Royal College of Art in the 1990s, when the influence of Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall and Philip-Lorca diCorcia loomed large and documentary was shunned in favour of elaborate staging. Her photographs, which are printed in large format – 4ft x 5ft – for exhibitions, can seem like stills from a mysterious film. Likewise, in book form, you sometimes long for a written narrative, not so much to shed light on the images but to accentuate the sense of mystery.

In the first image in Running Wild, a young girl stands atop a field of newly mown hay, clutching a bunch of leaves. She is looking up at an elevated radar mast that imbues an otherwise beautiful image with a certain tension familiar from sci-fi films or certain novels by JG Ballard. (Most of the pictures in this series were made before Kearney discovered the Ballard story that she borrowed for its title.)

Elsewhere, young girls explore polytunnels and dilapidated greenhouses, where nothing but weeds grow. They are free but perhaps lost – though they do not act that way. Always, whether pushing a bike though an inlet or dragging a huge, heavy bag across a snow-covered wasteland, they seem totally immersed in what they are doing and utterly unafraid. In one arresting image, a girl lies on concrete reading a book outside some disused buildings, all brick and rusting tin, as if she is utterly used to this empty, ominous landscape.

This is a constructed world where all the adults – and, intriguingly, boys – have disappeared and, as such, it recalls both the lost worlds of so much science fiction but also an actual lost world of childhood, one that has been destroyed by often hysterical adult fears about children's safety. "The risk," writes Phillips, "is that in protecting children we also protect them from the experiences that matter most to them; from their informal inventiveness and their vagrant curiosity."

Apart from the strange, almost eerie metaphorical power of these photographs, they also, by their meticulously constructed nature, alert us to the nature of photography itself. The girls are, of course, not alone nor lost in reverie; they are behaving that way for the artist's camera. She is looking at them and, in a way, looking out for them – by her very presence. That Kearney herself grew up on the Norfolk coast, and often was allowed to run free with other children in that flat expansive landscape, also lends Running Wild the feel of a conceptual memoir and perhaps accounts for the sense of loss that is palpable throughout.

Kearney, then, is a storyteller, a choreographer and a director as well as photographer, but the story she tells is all suggestion. It leaves enough space for us to enter and project our own childhood – or, more precisely, our remembered, idealised childhood – on to it. For all the fantasy inherent in these images, they evoke a very real and recognisable world of reverie, exploration, curiosity and a certain defiant bravery, all of which are formative experiences that now seem threatened by parental over-protection and the constant distractions of digital screens, phones and handsets.

Running Wild is available from Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery

 

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