number one, I emerge from the darkness like a spaceship. I start with terror and then relief. The gates at my entrance have water spouts that are small gargoyles. I am a thing among things, and out of context.

number two, I am a line, a flat surface, I am an atmosphere of surfaces. I take on light and give out light. Light is contained within me, I give light to you. You only see between me.

Art and text - writing the exegesis

I am coming to the point of my MFA where I am having to formulate the plan for the written exegesis. I do have a strong grasp on my visual elements, my photographs and lightscapes. As a narrative of elements I can read them well. They feel strong, they convey and speak how I want them to. How then - Do I adequately translate or describe these images via the use of text. The actual written element to my MFA has been giving me a certain amount of anxiety. I get terrified sitting and looking at the blank white void of a piece of paper or a word processing workbook. I am frustrated by the 1.5 spaced linework and the deep theoretical arrangement of my ideas. In my images, how I feel and what I want to say comes very naturally. However, the written part stand so far apart from my aesthetic. The text is bland, long, it meanders through syntaxes and discourses that are heavy and cold.

I have been thinking a lot about how to challenge my written element, how to approach it so that it complements and extends my visual research, not just stands beside it as a static and confusing essay. Speaking with my supervisor, I explained my hesitation, my fear that the images and the text would end up working against each other, not with each other.

She suggested that perhaps I wanted to approach my exegesis as an artists book. A visual/textual (intertextual) combination, that would aim to sew my ideas together, offer a mapping or topological tool to formulate a discussion that works with my visual elements. I think, in my head, I had this surge of relief. This was the permission I was after. It seems strange that you would need permission to explore your own practice, but sometimes the practicalities and expectation of an academic environment weight heavily. Marks, scholarships, applications, deadlines all scream for you to keep working with the establishment. But now I had someone saying that this course, indeed my research area almost craved an exploration using intertextual elements, maybe even a narrative story, meandering the colour and spaces of my images, throwing out questions only to pick them up on a later page, where ideas folded out into big maps, where there could be conversations and notes and diaries, a real examination of the research process, a real confrontation with the idea of writing and the idea of art (are they so different).

So now I am working on how to pull it all together. The visual (I can see) the text (I can hear) the meshing of synapses.

A map is, after all, just another kind of picture.


so.

What do you want to say?
How can many elements help to tell the same story?
Does this show a sense of immediacy or urgency?
Is it cohesive? Can it be cohesive?
Is it accessible, can it be read and understood?
How can my aesthetics be explored through text?
What is the language I want to use?
How do I read art, how do I read text?
how can writing then become an object?

Am I an interdisciplinary professional? Have I just realised how everything connects? How do I allow the text to contribute to my visual work? Is it an aside, or is it essential?

The instability of water contained in fleshy ground. The ground is a container - a receptacle. We can feel the moment; the time in this image through the vision of water contained for a moment. The water in the image speaks of the rain that fell, and the ground that will soak it up. Leaves blow across the surface, and a small glow of light shines as the water collects together. Time lets like meld into like, across an uneven surface. The moment before a dam bursts, a creek flows or rain falls is a stillness of a body awaiting escape. The moment here is the containment. The moment gives us a sense of power. We can see here the glittering sun; the seeping water, full of promise to become something else, to become part of something else, swallowed up. After it came, before it goes.




Emerging specters. The known is obscured being light; shadows; information. Between here and there is a journey. So the cinema of moments shows us how ones gets to somewhere else. A figurative journey, or a physical one. We almost can feel being present here, wanting to crawl through the leaves, pull branches aside, get there, faster. But we are caught, suspended in an uneasy state. Our eyes have time to wander, occluded spaces are revealed, time slows and we can SEE, for a moment, a thousand paths we could take, where to from here? Are we passing by? What do I want here? To look, to see, or to be there, to be present in that space? In some instances objects in the foreground give a sense of retreat. I am leaving this house, I am covered again, clouded, surrounded by information I know nothing.

A conversation regarding this image

N:
as if you were flying when you took this
i do not like the title.
cause i do not see the whatever "nothingness" in it.
its vibrant, luscious, in motion...the image in motion, my eyes sway.and for whatever feeling i am feeling it feels like nature symbolizing the digital age....????
i think you should do more of this.....

M:
the nothingness is the antithisis of this picture. the opposite, this image is the everything. its movement, colour, light, shape, it is tone and form, it buries us, overwhelms us.
It transmits, like a virus, all the feeling, and all the knowledge of a moment in time, staring, falling,
But never still, but always contained.

A pictorial reflection on Henri Bergson Matter and Memory

Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body.- Henri Bergson Matter and Memory

A story - reflection from Berlin 2004

For months, while living in the student dorms in Berlin, I would pass this window. I became obsessed with looking out of it. The view was the bramble branches of a tree, and one day I saw in the branches a nest. The nest had eggs, blue ones, grey ones, maybe blue-grey, and I would state at them each time I walked past, waiting for them to hatch. They never did, at least while I was there. Maybe the eggs just went away, like they were eaten or the wind blew them away. More likely I forgot if they just went away or I left before they changed. But I like the repetition in my head, when I think about it, the pause, the waiting, this internal stasis.

reflection on: A History of Colours, Manilo Brusatin

This is beautiful:

Sounds reveal a passage of time, an intensity, a timbre; colours a darkness, a clarity, a tone. Timbres and tones may possibly bear a resemblance to each other, but beyond these, sounds seem to fly away (reverberate) into the dimension of space, which contains them, whereas colours move through the dimension of time, which keeps or consumes them. We are pushed toward the colours of our memories as towards the resonances of places we have known. - A History of Colours, Manilo Brusatin


This is kind of exactly what my entire practice is about. Colour, Light, Memory, and the psychology of these tones' physicality, the knowledge of their appearance and their use as mnemonic devices.

Its like pathology, and photography captures it so well. The drama of space that contains them, propels them, and the bodies that feel their pulse and perceive them. Its so quiet, so slow, so elongated, the feeling of describing them bloom of light/colour in the mind or on the body of a person. Like a memory or scar. A secret.

Apparitions at twilight
Night storms, darkness, hidden existence. An electric clap and the hidden is made visible. A drama of space between the negative and the positive, light and dark. Knowable forms give way to blooming apparitions. We see a change, a shift, an uncomfortable awakening. For a moment I must recognise: what I hear, see, and feel; this forms what I know. These are the senses that make me, and my knowledge of this space. Then, seen slightly, as if in a dream state, a flash, the sky opens, a temporary emergence of the hidden, an illumination in the half-light. In a quickening of optical impulses I see the leaves, the tree. Then it is gone. The photograph slows the apparition. An eternal moment.


“In either case, what is seen fills the field of vision, but the field of vision is never taken as all there is to see.”- Marilyn Strathern After Nature


I am thinking about here, to borrow a term from Walter Benjamin, the body as darkroom. The body itself as a house of images. Light impressions pressed into the skin, literally burnt on our bodies. A participation in an organic process. The water creates rivulets on her back, her hair is like a foliage creeping over, moving towards the light. Outside, in the darkness, light floods through branches. There is a slow awakening, a blooming as the trees take their shape, other organic apparitions. Once before the trees were hidden from themselves, or hidden from my own self. I am seared through with light. Becoming an apparition.


I am experimenting with photographing as I walk, as I interact. The photographic act is integral, the camera is my third eye, it uncovers what I can not see alone. There are twilight forces; storms, the sea, wind, lights, and also, apparitions of the day. Full sunlight, shimmering iridescence, blindness by light. I am reading Words of Light I am reading Fear of Freedom, I am reading Invisible Cities and Warped Space. I recognise that my images are informed by the junction, or in some ways, collision of the natural organic world, and the constructed human world. In images such as the above I want to have an absence of the perceptible (the street) but recognise that the natural is still bound to the constructed world it pushes against. The hidden world exists in the one I live within. It is not a metaphoric or idealised natural landscape or the country-side where nature exists as intended. It does exist both outside of me and inside of me. It is my physiology. It is nature slipping between and beneath buildings. It is oil slick. It is the water parting over concrete, it is a body and a skin, existing on the edge between sight and touch, measured in the time a word is spoken, a memory recalled, a flash of lightning, a sunburn to form.


Transformations of the landscape affect the definition of the subject regarding them. I am interested in the meteorological nature of my work. A leaf falls against a gutter, clinging for a moment before being swept along.


I think of the work of Bill Viola - Departing Angel and The Reflective Pool. My own physiology dwells in contrast to the immediate constant flow of water, and its ebbs and cycles. I am still, and a participant only in stages. I wonder about wandering in a fog, and how different things would seem there. Known things, a road, a sign, a path, a puddle. I think about technology, how I could know all things, maybe. I could know everything, but I know nothing. I comprehend cyberspace but barely know my own geography. I am a stranger in the dark. The tree resembles a human limb, my limb, my phantom limb.


My Ghost

You can see an online version of my Honours Thesis Starting Points and Destinations here: http://www.invisiblecity.org/essay/.

The thesis explores concepts of memory, travel, space and place, including musings on the operation of monuments, cities of the gigantic, and non-places such as airports. The thesis then examines photography as a tool to join fractured narritives and explorations.

A criticism I give it now is its fusion of two disperate ideas: "non-places" and "fractured memory" which I tried, somewhat unsucessfully, to argue as related concepts in relation to ideas of travel and spacial and placial awareness. I feel I had too much going on, and my photographs, instead of being a collection of different images highlighting and exploring these concepts, operated more in a reconnected narrative sense which was at times confusing.

I like the chapters individually where I concentrate on different ideas, places and actions, and then explain why I photograph them and how the act of photography itself as a participation in those... but I feel I fall down when I try to explain this idea of "rebuilding narratives". I should have really got rid of the entire reference to non-places, which would have given my argument a greater degree of synthesis.

Also I do not touch enough on the subjectivity of such processes in my essay, which was difficult because my images were so subjective. I think I tried to intellectualise my idea too much (I was trying to legitimise) where I should have been challanging, addressing and teasing out the subjectivity of my work a bit more.

Anyway, I love the ideas I addressed, and would love to expand on it in the future.