“Nadege Meriau’s intriguing photographs bring to mind film rather than the still image. Like David Lynch’s warped vision from the edges of the psyche, they conflate the familiar with the unexpected, even unsettling, to create a dream world where, despite everything seeming right, it is actually all wrong. Drawing on our subconscious imagination, they conjure the apparently impossible with a magician’s sleight of hand, like Elsie Wright and Francis Griffith’s fairies at the bottom of their Cottingley garden.”
Greg Hobson, National Media Museum, 2008


Drawing on psychoanalysis and surrealism my earlier series Mise en Scene depicts the house as a psychically charged space. It is the home of fairy tales where animals symbolise human phobias, obsessions and repressed desires, where mysterious rituals take place behind closed doors.
The photographs are ambiguous narratives where innocence meets darkness, humour borders on the absurd and beauty is tinted with menace.
Some images have been carefully staged with the help of animal handlers.
However unexpected the scenes may be they were all enacted for real, with live animals leaving the outcome of the work less controllable and allowing ‘natural’ behaviour to become part of the underlying narrative.
The series also explores the boundary between image and reality through trompe l’oeil scenarios where wallpapers, murals and fabric patterns enter a dialogue with main foreground subjects.
Representations of the natural world in the domestic and urban environment are examined and juxtaposed with live beings and vegetation so as to bring out the underlying tensions between the imaginary and the real.










SCHWEPPES PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PRIZE 2005

“There are many arresting images in this third year of the Schweppes Portrait Prize. Not least among them is Nadege Meriau’s portrait of Maya (pictured), an image that fronts the publicity for this annual award.
In it, the young girl holds what we assume is a pet rabbit (which was, in fact, hired for the shoot) tightly to her chest as she crouches in the corner of a garden. She wears the slightly unsettling, penetrating gaze of a child, yet the physical awkwardness of adolescence is just beginning to creep in.”
Fisun Guner, Art Review, Metro, 2005