Light, Internal and Incident – Question 9
How does your photographic work relate to recent sculptures?
In both mediums I use the respective technique to reveal elements of time and form. With the pinhole photography the very long exposures accumulate successive images of the subject to form a single representation over a period of time. Detail becomes form loosing its particularity of information in return for density of meaning. With the sculptures detail punctuates the form like each second of a day.
To say that light forms the image in both cases is to almost state the obvious. Painting and photography on the other hand creates its own internal light. What separates a photograph from a sculpture is that the former cannot exist without light whereas a sculpture is pure form and does not disappear in the dark. Object sculpture and much else deals with texture and volume, qualities that are independent of our ability to see them. A photograph only creates the illusion of texture just as a painting creates the illusion of depth. Fontana literally broke through this illusion and Stella played up to its constraints.
There is also another dimension which is purely conceptual. This is clearly demonstrated in the juxtaposition of one of my recent protogenetor forms and the pinhole photographs of Michelangelo’s prisoners I took in 2003 at the Accademia Gallery in Florence. Buonarotti drew out platonic forms of Man locked in the struggle to emerge into existence. This evolution of a distant ideal is in the realms of my current work which delves into a distant past idealized into a neo-platonic visualisation by force of the separation of time and imagination. Both the Prisoners and my work are evolutionary, both emerge out of cosmological ideas and a quest for origins, both deal directly with form. I appropriated the images which are now collectively owned by all humanity in my own way. Constructing a camera and reducing the images to a minimum to describe a sense of emergence.
Michelangelo removed material from the surrounding figures, as he said, trapped inside the stone. This I recorded using light and translated the images as a density of negative space defining the luminous content. My models directly displace space through an additive process rather than a subtractive one. Whereas in one set of works I look at the process of uncovering form with light (or rather the subtraction of light which is then reversed when printing the negative), in the other build out a vision through a direct sense of space by means of touch in which light plays an important but arbitrary and ever changing role.