J.Dorothea Smith

The imagination is a deeply consuming place, and yet its hold is delicate and fleeting, a moment of reverie can be easily ended by small external, or indeed internal, forces. A noise, a movement a banal thought, can remove us, only to return at a later time and the moment is lost or changed, never being recaptured in the same way, we have changed since the last visit. This is a phenomena that is attached to the photographic artefact, every time we revisit this place of memory it is different, here is the crux, photographs are not merely representational an aide memoir—they can be mirrors into to the imaginary. We are the mediators and we decide on meanings of place and is this infinite? Imaginings have perceived beginnings and the possibility of no end, just a series of visitations that are differing and open ended. The photograph is a revenant.

My research sets up and enquiry into the ontology of photography and the overlap with the ontology of matter. Exploring creative interventions, re-thinking the technological as a way of illuminating the relationship between matter, truth and the creation of representational visual forms. Exploring diverse areas of trans-disciplinary research will form the basis for an intervention in and contextualisation of photographies that acknowledges the molecular and quantum. Many disciplines talk in terms of the human and the quantum but can the photographic be a useful way to discuss a link between these spaces? The persistence of the visual and its saccadic motion within the human body create a unique question about the photographic and the need to ‘fix’ images in place. The surfaces of the retina receive discrete packages of information in the form of photons with which our neurological matter and receptors perform processes which decipher what we see. But as we continue to extend the possibilities of what we might ‘see’ with new technologies and our understandings of the molecular and quantum spaces--will this change our representations and also our perceived experiences?

The embodiment of person in place is central to the work on this website, although not being happy to be only concerned with Phenomenological matters. Elements of the modern and documentary have bled in through the fine lines and wrinkles. Like my lipstick, the aesthetic often covers the real. The spaces here represent the liminal, the interstices between my understanding of the real and my human reaction to the unreal experience of the everyday in an anxious fragile existence. My interactions with the land and places are both embodied experience and research. This research can, and often does, involve scientific papers, creative literature, memory excavation and politics. These things are present, look closely.