On Incidents and Arguments:

At play are the sliding surfaces and spaces of the self-contained image-space and the external here and now. The figures are anonymous vessels, actors in arbitrary encounters, personifications of the photograph. Paradoxically the figures seem conscious of the cut voids and mirror incursions that undermine their image world.

Works include:



Proof, 2008-10

Two face mounted c-type prints to glass, cut out, two-way mirror (half silvered) sandwiched between. Installed with light or lighter area or view to one side. Hung in free space, vertical.

The unexposed, usually hermetically sealed world of the photographic image, dark and empty until flooded on exposure. In the gallery space, as the viewer moves around to view either side (where the image is reversed), the rectangle of half-silvered mirror serves to shift the work between the happened-then and happening-now, representation and reflection.




The Appearance, 2008-10

Face mounted C-type print to glass, cut out, mirror laminated to rear, shelf mounted, leaning back.

A Cartesian grid-like image space intersected by a looming mirror-void which appears to align with the depth of the pictorial space, until the examination of its cut edges return it to the flat surface of the print. The woman looks into the mirror, her posture somewhere between fear and fascination; does she see herself or inversely, the ceiling of the gallery space?




Myth, 2008-10

Face mounted C-type print to glass, cut out, mirror laminated to rear, inset in plinth base.

A multi-layered allegory for photography and our fascination with representation; the figure of a young girl looks in a mirror, itself the first form of ‘perfect’ reality shown back to us. The mirror here as a pool, the earliest form of reflection again, referencing the Greek and Roman tale of Narcissus who was transfixed by his own reflection. The mirror-void cut parallel to the surface in opposition to the perspective of the image. The work is sited close to floor level, countering usual wall-based presentations. The viewer is allowed to sit and lean over to view the work echoing the activity of the girl in the photograph.