Natasha Caruana

Biography

Natasha Caruana is an artist and founder of the London based studioSTRIKE artists studios. She holds an MA in photography from the Royal College of Art and is a lecturer at the University for the Creative Arts, UK.

Caruana's art is grounded in research, drawing from archives, the Internet and personal narratives. Her work has been exhibited in various group shows, such as Invisible Adversaries, alongside Francesco Goya and John Constable at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary of Art, UK. Previous group and solo exhibitions have been in the USA, Poland, Germany and Saudi Arabia. Her work is held in the collections of the UK's British Library, Woman's Library and The Kinsey Institute in the United States.

Shortlisted for the National Magazine Award, the Deutsche Bank Pyramid prize, her work has also been featured in the British Journal of Photography (2011) and was selected by Humble Arts Foundation as one of Britain's 18 leading female art photographers.

For more information, visit Natasha Caruana's website here

Artist Statement

Fairytale for Sale explores wedding customs in the UK, revealing the fantasy, performance and trophy moments of the traditional 'big day'. The smiling faces of the bride, groom and their entourages are blocked out in white, masked over, smothered in blue tac or scratched off in a bid to disguise and make anonymous their private day, now in the public arena. What remains are bizarre theatres of marriage; white-faced performers have taken to the stage and act out emblematic scenes. The artist, posing as someone on the quest for the perfect dress, befriended the brides in order to gain higher resolution images than those used for the Internet advertisements. The original wedding album represents the 'trophy', the validation of a ceremony, a ritual performed, a tradition upheld as a record of the perfect day. Now the party is over, the cake has been eaten, the presents have been opened, and the photographs have been framed; the online advertisements represent the detritus, the props of the fairytale wedding production.