contained within and without

Digital prints and magnifying plastic 2001: 17x 18cm

This work was a series created for the second exhibition. This project was a curatorial collaboration, a collection of artists where selected and given a brief to explore the space between one subway display case and its adjoining space.

I worked with the actual architecture of the display case, as it had the design appearance of train windows. I videoed outside and within trains capturing people for stills. A voyeuristic look at people in private moments within public space. A sense of the moment condensed and amplified. Bottled time whereby the passing is suspended.

Exploring the transitional boundaries of public space and the particular emotions and expressions of each commuter seemingly suspended within the illuminated lense scupltures. Referencing photography’s own process of creating perception of recorded time.

transfigurative illumination

Xrays 1998 –2000: 35 x 42cm.

The process of making these art works was achieved with the assistance of a radiologist both at the Hospital and later at a University. Plaster casts were taken from people, then reconstructed and taken into a radiology school to be X-rayed. Plaster has a similar density to bone, and can therefore be picked up in Xray. In recreating the image of the body with a sense of its own life force and volition, I was challenging the medical model of compart-mentalising and pathologising the body.

I have intersected boundaries, to reverse the image of the physical body in clinical diagnostics. The chemical processes of the X-ray resurfaces the identity of the individual being scientifically investigated. The formation of a two dimensional image from a three dimensional form, which can be seen from all surfaces, is a rare event. It is magical to be able to see through the figure in this sense, and yet still determine its outer form. Visually the image demands concentration and interaction to read its shifting sense of form from a surface to an object. I felt these works embraced ideas I had of the body as a corset for light.

The title's use of the word 'transfigurative' refers to the notion of illumination after death, creating a reference to the idea of transformation and revelation through light.



the light inside is eternal

B&W Polaroids 1998-99: 10 X 15cm

This series of images is quite extensive. During a self initiated artist residency at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, I worked on art which responded to both the site and activity of the site. I had close association with the place as I had trained to be a nurse at the hospital in 1988 for three years. I wanted to create work that impressed the internal nature of transition through the space. I exposed aspects of the architecture to create a sense of analogy to the body and the people within as shadowy figures moving through its caverns.

The medium circumvented clarity and this then distinguished an emotive polarity, with all the light source sketching an outside world from which each person had transited from. Its only outside in which time passes, in the Hospital the mechanisms of its activities never cease and the light is eternally fluorescent. In visiting or working the nature of the hospital is distinct and separate to that which continues on further from its borders.

spirit hole

B&W photograms 1996: 25 X 10cm.

This work explored the ideas within Mayan ceramic funeral sculpture, whereby holes where left within the figurines to allow the spirit to escape. I took small sculptures and exposed them on top of photography paper. This imagery captures a sense of life force within a figure and was a precursor to my explorations with Xrays.