Wendy McMurdo: The Digital Mirror art review – Losing childhood innocence
Tackling the consequences of the digital revolution, this exhibition charts the changing reality of childhood as play becomes tainted by computer screens
Wendy McMurdo has an impressive portfolio. One of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hundred Heroines, her work exploring childhood’s malleable reality has shaped minds in prestigious art institutions for two decades and her latest exhibition is no less impactful. Modern images, juxtaposed with artworks which echo McMurdo’s own Edinburgh upbringing, give The Digital Mirror an initial sense of beauty and unease. Taking her portfolio from the 90s to today, she charts a child-centred relationship with the digital environment at a time when technology, once confined to science fiction, became the norm.
The photographs, digitally altered to create an invisible void where devices are held, illustrate a timely picture: a childhood which slips through the fingers of new generations. Trips to the museum, touching the ice at Dynamic Earth and dressing up for Halloween sit beside tapping fingers on new classroom computers and an empty room with a school kid swiping a blank space. Both nostalgic and despairing, the subjects shape the world around them, despite being inconstant and distorted. In the centre of the images, a screen shows a classroom with a translucent digital object, an uninvited guest. Yet as the exhibition continues, so does a reminder of the unflinchingly playful nature of childhood that lives between the real and the imagined, even in our hyper-digital present.
Wendy McMurdo: The Digital Mirror, National Galleries Of Scotland: Portrait, until 25 October.