Photograph on paper
Signed on the front.
Since 2003 I am exploring the technical and expressive possibilities of the desktop scanner as a camera, operating in the realm of what is highly staged and 'still': ‘still life’ and 'still just visible' to the human eye.
The scanner’s peculiarities of “time-space exposure” make light visible in an unfamiliar way, and subvert traditional notions of fore-& background. This compositional and spatial aspect of 'linear' light is integral part of the transcendent/surreal qualities I try to invoke from my compositions, the subject matter of which are mostly small, discarded, dead objects; often insects, feathers and parts of plants, but also human made objects.
The resulting still life tableaux inevitably reference the art that shaped me, most notably surrealism, and in this case: Ernst Haeckel and Karl Blossfeldt.
The images is called Moreton Bay Trip because it was made for an exhibition in one of the Moreton Bay Reg. Galleries, and uses subject matter collected in Moreton Bay Shire (and Brisbane), on regular visits to Mt Nebo and Mt Glorious, Samford, Redcliffe peninsula, Bribie Island, Strathpine – and it quite obvsly. is a triptych.
The panels are views through windows into the moodily illuminated world of complex, cultured and diverse civilisation, cycling through flowering, fruiting and decay.
Constructing the images is a bit like the pursuit of ‘symbolical alchemy’: Turning dirt to gold.
Nature’s little left-overs defying decay, re-configured into tableaux of mysterious meaning, imagining the subtle motions and energetic processes running both, nature in it’s entirety, as well as one’s personal inner life, ...never to be understood with the pre-frontal cortex alone...
And while these macrocosmic and microscopic deep-ecological subtle energy processes often times seem separate from, and irrelevant to our outwardly material human machinations involving houses, cars, jet skis, mortgages and smart phones – it is of course these subtle processes that really run the show.