Crash 4 – Florence Nightingale

Crash 4 – Florence Nightingale is part of  a series of six limited edition screenprints by Patrizio Belcampo.  Limited edition of only 14.

‘The initial concept for the whole series was to imagine post-train crash scenarios in different times of railway history. The objects and people inside the train would become fused with the environment on the site of the crash, becoming integrated with it and reforming as seemingly functioning complex organisms. In order to generate ideas as to the elements/imagery to use in each one of these hybrid structures, I sought inspiration in the biography of eminent Victorian (or Victorian-born) figures in whose life and achievement I have an interest. The place and date of their death appears in the background of each print. These are, in order, Prince Albert, Aubrey Beardsley, Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale and the writers Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence. In this way the idea of crash became also a way of presenting a synthetic image of someone’s biography, a sort of visual resume of some of the key elements of their lives at the time they died. This wasn’t done in a strictly philological way, so some elements are more pertinent than others, some have only been introduced because they functioned formally within the image, but don’t relate specifically to that person’s biography. Each image was drawn and then cut out of one piece of paper to create a stencil for the  screenprint.’ Patrizio Belcampo

Patrizio was originally born in Ravenna, North-Eastern Italy but he has lived and worked in Edinburgh since 2003 and graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2011.