Category: Series

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