Output details

'Family Tree' and 'Matter & Memory'.

Mixed Media Artwork

These works engage with ‘playful optics’ - a reworking of Duchamp’s ‘playful physics’ (see Henderson, ‘Duchamp in Context’, 2005).

The title of ‘Matter and Memory’ is taken from Henri Bergson’s 1896 book of the same name. Drawing on Bergson, the work examines how an object can be presented simultaneously both as a simulation and a physical thing. The view through the glass orb, (which references the mechanism of the human eye) can be viewed as a simulation of subjective perception. The virtuality of this experience is contrasted by the materiality of the sculpture. The work consists of a surgical endoscope (a surgical instrument used to see inside the body used in keyhole surgery) penetrating through an inverted tree trunk. Through the endoscope, viewers see an image of the space around the sculpture, which they perceive to be inverted and refracted in comparison with their experiential memory of that space.

‘Family Tree’ consists of a white box the same scale as the human head. The viewer is required to bend down to look through an eye-shaped aperture cut through the front of the box, to be confronted by their own eye captured and reflected hundreds of times in the multiplying perspectives facilitated by the eccentric properties of the mirrors lining the box. The subject’s perceptions are disturbed by the apparently impossible scale of the box’s interior. The distortion works to generate a sense of subjective ambivalence through the fragmentation of the subject’s reflection. In addition the spatial scale generated inside the box by the multiplying reflections appear incompatible with the physical scale of the box. This ambiguity disturbs normal perceptions of objective reality.

By unsettling the subject’s experience of reality in this way, these works investigate the relationships between optical perception, materiality, and the mental conceptualisation of objects.