Esther Teichmann is a German American photographer, writer and curator. She works across still and moving image, sculpture and painting and combines themes of autobiography and mythology in her work. Often inspired by the writings of Georges Bataille and Marguerite Duras, her photographs and writing explore alternative worlds and utopic visions and play with the tensions between desire, fantasy and threat.

Many of Teichmann’s pictures explore relationships to the maternal, memories and feelings of being homesick. As a result, she constructs moving and immersive images that sit between fantasy and reality and past and present. The photograph offered to the museum as a gift shows Teichmann’s ability and skill to create otherworldly images that combine the autobiographical and the mythological. Taken near her family home in the Rhine valley, the picture depicts her parents in a rubber dinghy in a pastel-hued swamp that is hand-painted by Teichmann. As the inflatable travels through the dying trees and decomposing landscape, the artist’s parents are surrounded by an ethereal environment with a disturbing post-apocalyptic appearance.

Teichmann’s work plays with the conventions of photography and the tensions between reality and illusion. For Teichmann, ‘photography is always at the centre of my practice…it’s such an elastic and physical medium, but fundamentally the thing that draws me in is the relationship between the real and the staged, the duality between the real and the constructed, the world that exists and the otherworldly. It’s this dynamic that keeps me wedded to the medium and continually excited by it.’