THE RECLINING FIGURE

The Reclining Figure draws on 18th- and 19th-century prints depicting English private estates—castles, manors, and landscaped grounds. These images present a countryside shaped by the Enclosure Acts, which converted common land into private property and fundamentally restructured both the visual character and social order of the English landscape.  

The project traces a line from these historical enclosures to contemporary forms of restriction and displacement. The political and economic forces that once determined who could access land persist today, continuing to shape patterns of exclusion. The work responds through an act of iconoclasm. By printing news images directly onto the original prints, inherited representations are disrupted: old scenes partially erased, new images emerging through the overwriting.

The title refers to an image of Lord Byron reclining in the Roman countryside—a pose suggesting proprietary ease, a body at rest that quietly asserts dominion over the terrain it surveys.