Guardians

Guardians is motivated by the notion of photographing the unseen. The series began alongside the images for Stomp, ( 2017 exhibition and book) . In a way Guardians are an antidote to the physical destruction of Stomp. Guardians are a mix of hope, wishes, and magical thinking for some watch-out of safety in troubled times. Aesthetically Guardians revisits themes from my earliest work “Silence” (1993) which include ideas of ability and disability, and the impact of technology on human experience. In this work suggestion and uncertainty are a space where discomfort draws in our imagination to fill things in. The outcome is no longer a one way gaze. Guardians comes long after the series of installations in the 90's when my work considered our capacity to hear, see, and connect, especially in our reading of the human face. Traditions of portraiture are a framing for reading the pictures. Photos in Stomp are an endpoint for the facial portrait. Guardians is an attempt to capture the elusive by leveraging the window and decisive moment of photography. The physical pictures in Guardians are literally that: real photos of 3D events – essentially unaltered beyond the camera. For me the sensations of seeing a photo on paper are important to enable the viewing to be different to that for virtual images. Guardians grasps at glimpses of something from the past to provide protection now, when visual acuity and information cannot stop us from stepping close to the precipice.