points of convergence

The series of images (the collective of images?) that I am working on at the moment is tentatively called "Hold on Tight". Hold on tight little children, as you tumble down the rabbit hole. My work is very much influenced by literary works, especially those where the child is transported into a new world, where rules are turned upside down and danger lurks and children do not act like children of the "real world". Like Alice down the rabbit hole, Dorothy over the rainbow, and picnicking girls at hanging rock, young children disappear, and then reappear in a dream world and violence happens. (And here I refer not only to the real and imagined threat of physical violence, but also violent thought, violent position and psychological violence.)

In creating these unreal worlds I have chosen to work with cross-processed slide film that I feel enhances the surreal pictorialism of these photographs. My understanding of pictorialism is to create a tableaux, a picture that tells a story of something that is not quite real, but perhaps we wish was. The early pictorial photographs were created as artworks in themselves, dreamy, wistful, staged creations that mimicked reality in their aesthetic aspirations. Pushing the boundary further I want to create these scenes within my images that come to life from a surreal perspective. Their motivation is not to "be pretty" however their aesthetics cannot be ignored. The images confuse the conscious mind because they disguise reality, they are real, but you can not imagine this reality. As such the conscious mind lays down and the unconscious, ruled by dreams, memory and anxiety surfaces, fully equipped to delve into this surreal world. The unconscious mind is highly sensitised and is able to get to the point where "which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the heights and the depths, cease to be perceived contradictably" . By using the visual triggers of beauty and terror (delight), both the conscious and unconscious mind can immerse in the landscape of the image. The overt and overplayed reality mixes with a dream state and creates the sur-reality, the reality beyond reality.

Indeed surrealism could be seen as imagery devoid of symbolism, which is where I diverge, so my images are not so much surrealist as they are surreal. If surrealism is creation from the pure state of a young child, then my surreal world is creation from a collective conscious of memory, experienced from the perspective of a child. I want the contamination of life, I do not wish to regress, my images require the knowledge and experience of the adult, and then that experience is transplanted to the child. I am aiming to make my images emotionally and psychologically intimate, so that they exist beyond the physical (what we know is there) to what we are scared to acknowledge (for fear it will appear). Through the gaze of the viewer, of an adult, an uneasy exchange is played out. These images are unnerving because they do not allow the adult to feel superior to the child. The child in my images does not solicit nurturing or protection from the adult, at all times the child is in control of their surroundings. If the child does look out to the viewer, it is steady and unquestioning, as if the child stares right through and knows all the shame of experience the adult contains within their gaze. The world the child inhabits is not one based in "reality", there is no mother, no sign of control, and so the will of the adult cannot reckon with the eerily impassive child.

I aim to make the viewer feel anxious and uneasy, by playing on secret desires and the anxiety inducing chance one might want to experience those desires. These desires then create a claustrophobic feeling both physical and mental, where one does not know what to think and that uncertainty of thought induces a heightened awareness of one's own physicality "thought creates a confrontation...a wandering at the limits of what is thinkable." Because the child is seen as innocent and pure, the projection of desire and terror is seen as dirty, and perhaps even sinful, sullying the state of childhood as one of wonder and discovery. What will the child discover, what have they already discovered about me? how could I think that? How do I feel about feeling that way or this way? Who will know? The presence of the child makes anxiety a likely event, as the viewer can remember being a child? however they are no longer that young or innocent, and what they know now could destroy the child they once were (in time). When one starts to think along these lines, the unease of being "discovered" heightens the physical feeling, not unlike when one is doing something wrong and is scared of being disturbed in the act. Perhaps what I would like is for people to let themselves be drawn to the image without needing the comfort of an "out".

"You can inhabit a space with consciousness without physically entering it, as in a dream. You can be in it physically and see it in that manner also. But whether you're in a space and looking at it or outside and looking in, it still has qualities of atmosphere, density, and grain so that your vision will penetrate differently in some areas than others."

I have also come to be influenced by ideas of the sublime, through the prevalent sense of violence and malaise that permeate the factionalised worlds presented in these pictures. What is real? What is imagined? Where is this terror causing event? (It is in your mind?) "The event" is ultimately unknowable because it changes for each person who gazes into the image. It cannot be named, but it does exist and will always exist. We cannot say what is entirely constructed does not speak the truth, and that what is presented, as unreality does not belie the secrets of "reality". William Burroughs said, "It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know he knows."

I would like to finish with a poetic excerpt from "The Stolen Child" by W. B. Yeats.

"Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand."


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