Islands and Contemporary Art

In this groundbreaking exploration, Gill Perry looks at the vital role that islands play in contemporary visual arts. Responding to the urgency of migration, climate change, and colonialism, artists create compelling and provocative works that resonate across colonised archipelagos.

Perry navigates the British Isles, Ireland, the Caribbean, Pacific Oceania, and the Galapagos and illuminates the role of islands in installation, multimedia, and film projects by renowned artists such as Robert Smithson, Lisa Reihana, Roni Horn, Rodney Graham, Tacita Dean, Cornelia Parker, and others from the 1970s to today.

In this exemplary and curious interweaving of themes, environments, communities and artworks, Gill Perry mobilises an ecologically aware, feminist, and postcolonial intelligence in the exploration of a conceptual archipelago of allegory, myth, and creative place-making. This generously illustrated book explores gender, ecology, politics, and aesthetics, entangled with the facts and fantasies of island stories. It provides an insightful understanding of how artists work to stimulate spectacular and elemental intimations of these elusive themes.

Barry Curtis, Istituto Marangoni and Central St Martins, London