Scattering the cremated ashes of my Grandfather onto photographic paper as photograms, a vision of the universe appears in which one can see almost as far back in time as the Big Bang, reconnecting the remains of the dead with the origin of all life. Inspired by the practice of space burial in which cremated remains are launched into outer space, Universal Sympathy is a journey from the black hole of the darkroom to the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. In the shadow cast by the trace of the ash, a black hole slowly emerges in which the void left by the other is made evident.
For Immanuel Kant, no infinity in space or nature could match the infinite scope of the human mind. Where the imaginative faculty fails in it’s ability to portray a representation of infinity, man’s ability to reason of infinity as an idea singled out the human mind as the one true sublime entity. In my practice I seek to portray the photograph as a sublime object in which the liminal boundary between the finite and infinite may be revealed. One may perceive evidence that in the imaginary attempt to reassemble a singularity from the body which now lies scattered, the sublime unity of the Big Bang can never be put back together for this moment has since faded from man’s view. Instead, I discover the traces of the body fragment in the indexical trace of the photogram to an infinity which is in itself sublime.
