2020
See Change
ALBERT – Royal Academy Summer Show 2019
Reparer
Camera-less, analogue, black & white prints produced solely using traditional darkroom techniques, 19x25cms
Me, Myself and I
One Black & White analogue print, map pins and invisible thread; after Looking at Faces and remembering them, Jacques Penry.
One black & white composite digital image.
One black & white digital image, hand painted, 28x32cms pinned onto Foamex and box framed.
Repository
Do Not Disturb
As something of an evocative object, The Nest constructed with barbed wire alludes to the nature of uncanny and fetish objects. The object might act as a stand in for thoughts that can’t be expressed and take the place of what cannot be spoken. It hints further towards a complex boundary, perhaps equally attractive and repellant and yet ultimately offering a specific kind of protection. The photograph itself has also been examined as an object in its own right. The lines between these objects is toyed with, both suggestive of restrictions, boundaries and the sometimes fine line between pleasure and pain.
Sculpture 50cmx50cms and accompanying photographs
Les Petites Morts (The Little Deaths)
Assembled under the title ‘Les Petites Morts’ (The Little Deaths) are thirteen photographs and an exhibits case. An idiom or metaphor for orgasm, the term may also refer to the sense that when some undesired thing happens to a person, and has affected them greatly, a part of them might die. This series explores the inability to process an event. The scene is a bed and a wall. The forensic officer’s task is to gather information, and to photograph, examine and retrieve evidence. By coupling forensic procedures with a personal aesthetic, the work forms something of a hybrid, which expresses a contradictory desire to reveal and yet conceal. Evidence may be erased and made invisible to the naked eye. But evidence as memory persists, and things may bear a residual memory. By using specialist lighting techniques and chemical treatments, scientists and specialist photographers are able to reveal that which is otherwise hidden. These mute objects, unable to speak for themselves, need ‘translating’ and ‘interpreting’ and are, as such, presented before the forum.
The work forms an imperfect dossier of evidence which plots a secret geography of the unspoken, and hints at Barthe’s ‘something else’ which exists beyond the realm of language. The dialectics of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, perhaps, finally reveal an impasse: ‘Car nous sommes ou nous ne sommes pas’
(For we are where we are not). Pierre-Jean, Jouve. Lyric 59
A combination of analogue, lith and digital prints, 40x30cms pinned onto Foamex and box framed. Exhibits case 50x40cms
Heather Miller 