Escape Artist (Green and Red) (2010)

Taken from her iconic series 'Escape Artist', Sam Taylor-Wood has produced a new print exclusively for Counter Editions - 'Escape Artist (Green and Red)' (2010). Reminiscent of the artist's earlier 'Self Portrait Suspended' series, these photographs show the artist similarly suspended mid-air, in this case from brightly coloured helium balloons. "I have to hide my face in the pictures. It is a combination of hiding the grimacing pain - because I think that destroys the photograph - but it is also because I don't think you need to see my face." She said the pain was necessary as the photographs were a response to her fight against cancer. "I made them shortly after I was no longer referring to myself as an ill person. There is a definite sense of physical freedom from the constraints of illness. Indeed, there is an air of the escape artist, of the magician, to these works. The artist does seem to be performing a miraculous act of levitation. The balloons surely aren't enough to stop her slumped descent to the hard ground below. And so what is holding her up? Perhaps nothing less than an act of faith.