The Hole in the title of this show refers partly to holes in the rock and partly to the holes in ourselves, and in our perception of the world.
I began the work with an interest in two main things: enclosed spaces that fill with water and then drain again and with placing blanks at the centre of images. Caves are a symbol of the unknown and the alien, but also of our own bodies with their mouths and passages and liquids. Their dark recesses and rock faces can be seen either as screens onto which we project our storehouse of unconscious imagery, or as membranes through which something, beyond our senses, makes contact:
“Hark ye yet again-the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!” Herman Melville. Moby Dick
I looked at the work of the Quattrocento religious painters who depicted caves as small interior stages for the personal dramas of the saints, their demons and mortifications. They show rock surfaces and textures in great naturalistic detail, but the gross morphologies and landscapes are improbable artifices.
I stitched dozens of individual images together to make these photographs, to emulate both this ambiguity and the way our eyes scan and probe the dark and light.
While doing this I abruptly developed an eye condition, which left me with a ‘scotoma’ or hole in my own vision. The blank area I had been putting at the centre of many of the photographs had suddenly become real. The work took on an urgency as the photographs developed into a commentary on what was happening to me medically.
Eyesight gives the illusion of a direct influx of meaning from the world to the mind, as f you wake up in the morning, open your eyes and God’s own truth floods in. Once my site was occluded I became aware of the extent to which we create and project what we see. These photographs are partly a search for a metaphor for this disruption of contact with the world.