Buoyancy

Buoyancy is about lightness and optimism, about the energy that comes to us from out of nowhere, it is about objects rising and floating, about the planets mysteriously suspended in silence in the universe. In this show, I wanted to make representations of the microcosm and the macrocosm of life as we know it—the planet and the cell—and relate them to bubbles and this feeling of expansive joy and hope.

“The photograph is the terrain”—Barbara Shinn

The pieces in this installation have been created without negatives (with the exception of the xrays). The photo paper has been painted with layers of developer, then was fixed and bleached down to construct images--so this process is both additive and reductive. This way of working is spontaneous, gestural and surprising—things happen that you cannot explain, and photo paper has an incredible range of memory, so anything you do, you have to live with it or bleach it out. This way of working is probably the opposite of digital, which is why it makes me sad that so many photo schools are removing their darkrooms—the history of photography is very short, there is still an enormous amount of unexplored territory.

The 4 long thin pieces are 8 feet tall, and the globe is 10 x 16 feet—