Dark Energy

In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is an enormous, yet invisible, mysterious force accelerating the expansion of the universe. In Ngunnawal country, Canberra’s Mount Stromlo holds deep significance – for settler scientists and its original indigenous inhabitants – as a portal to knowledge of ‘sky country’, dark energy and the cosmos. While our human connection to the night sky is a universal one, anchored by gravity as we are, we also experience it through the prism of place. Using native Australian botanical material collected on site at Mount Stromlo, archival material, film negatives and ephemera, and experimenting with light sources and darkroom chemicals, I set out to create a body of work that evoked the celestial and our emotional connection to landscape and cosmos, rather than documenting it literally. In doing so, I wanted to challenge conventional dichotomies: between earth’s surface and space; between science and the imagination; between the physical and metaphysical. Photograms, by their very nature, tease at the paradoxes of existence. Alchemic processes of silver particle activation and dislodgement reveal, to the eye, spiritual imprints and majestic white ‘shadows’ of long-departed physical matter. Through experimentation with photograms, cameraless techniques pioneered by the surrealists, Dark Energy probes eternal dynamic tensions between the known and the perhaps unknowable, between obscurity and revelation, and the magic elixirs of light and time, matter and energy – evoking notions of expansion and possibility. This series was created in 2024 as a Dark Matter artist-in-residence at Canberra’s PhotoAccess.