The body, lady, is like a house: it don't go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like an automobile: always on the move, always.
F. O'Connor
(from The Life You Save May Be Your Own)
There are always many levels to creating a piece of work that interest me: technical, theoretical, conceptual, philosophical and so on. My need for creating work is fuelled by a need for exploration and understanding through art. To reflect upon the perplexities of the mind and the world, the self and the other, of escapism, of reality and fiction, of memory and the pieces that fit (or don't fit) between.
With analogue photography the negative anchors the subject of the image to an actual occurrence. What is seen is rooted to a more certain degree in reality, it was. The digital image has no such negative. It is malleable and invites to a constant readjustment and re-evaluation of reality and the photographic 'moment'.
While the experience of the imaginary offers us an escape from 'the Real', it also offers us another path to the understanding of it. Fantasy is a link and a platform to render experience in another manner than within the restrictions of 'reality', the imaginary abides by no pure boundaries of logic and reason. These are separate, but linked worlds, and I reside in one no more than the other.
Computers have given photography the freedom of painting, whereby photographs can truly represent the ideas of their creators and not merely render what already exists.
-Simen Johan
This work explores the inwardness of a subject that lies beyond its external structure, a crossroad of inner and outer reality. It attempts to display the secret garden of things unseen, fragments of fairy tales reflecting an internal world, narrative moments with no real beginning and no definite end. "Fairy tales are for kids". Not an unknown statement, but far from what I believe. I believe it is a basic human need to escape into fantasy, if so only to better comprehend social reality. Adults make use of the fairy tale as much as children do. We watch films, read fiction, follow TV series and daydream. Perhaps our need for escapism is even greater than that of children as we are limited by having to conform to what is perceived to be 'normal' for adults.
In the whole realm of poetry no domain is so boundless as the fairy tale. It reaches from the blood-drenched graves of antiquity to the pious legends of a child's picture book; it takes in the poetry of the people and the poetry of the artist.
-H.C Andersen
I approach the making new work in a variety of ways. Some images are constructed by researching elements of interest and developing 'the idea', others appear from dreams or while reflecting upon the 'core structure' (former research etc) of an idea, and at other times, and this happens quite often, a location inspires a 'vision' and results in the creation of a site specific installation which is then photographed in one or more parts.
Digital photography allows me the freedom to control every element and my use of light painting allows me to manually apply light from any angel I see fit. It becomes a seductive balance of light and dark. The darkness represents the mind and the undercurrent depths of imagination. Light becomes the tool of exploration, like a spot on a theatre stage, carefully revealing only what you are meant to see. Applying it by hand, as if painting a canvas, gives it a sense of mystery and enhances the aspect of that 'other place'. Through photography I embody a fantasy world, the images becoming a gateway, keys to unlocking the unknown.
By keeping my characters mostly in masks they become part of the visual myth and their representation is suspended somewhere between fact and fiction. As the image as a whole, they contain traces and elements of 'real', but the things you see in the photograph never existed as you see them. Not in this reality anyway.
Everything we are allowed to approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy.
-J. Lacan
Thoughts to be continued...
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