matter
This ongoing body of work originated with images taken with a 35mm Nikon film camera in Catalonia during January 2013. This old Nikon used to be an extension of my arm. The use of this camera is unstructured and impulsive, a less self-conscious flow. It promotes a certain looseness that my larger cameras don’t allow. The images generated were gritty and grainy and a return to something informal and somehow intimate: images of landscape and immediate surroundings: trees, doorways, the light and shadows of interiors. Nevertheless, all were concerned with the play of light.
These images provoked a return to the studio to look more closely at the ways light describes surface. As a way to open up exploration, I selected a limited quantity of objects as a concentration of materials, materials with particular relevance to how light functions.
These new works are a particular consideration of light and dark, form and outline, material qualities, and the camera as a tool of abstraction. The glass, brushed aluminium, mirrors and perspex are sometimes backlit; arbitrary thumb prints and dust establish the materiality of transparency; seemingly unusual densities emerge; perspectives become skewed; white planes with black space. Through the positioning of objects, reflection and refraction, lines appear where there is seemingly no matter.