else/where

[2006]

In “else/where” I was trying to explore visually how we sense, perceive, and represent space. The idea was to depict the dimensions of inner space: inner projections – aspects which constitute the way we internalize and recall a place. The photographic images used in this work were triggers for mental images, independent of the narrative from which I’d extracted them. This led me to explore the visual aspect of memory, the mental image, as a means of recollection. The experience was to create, or draw a cognitive map – an entirely mental but highly visual process. While working on this project I was interested in the mental imagery engendered in the process of recollection, and the creation of our personal map/ atlas. The drawing in “else/where” does not seek to describe the appearance of natural objects as much as to preserve the trace of encountering/ experiencing / perceiving them. The erased lines/drawing in the deep and absorbent blackness of the background space are like a negative touch – a touch which takes away, like memory or oblivion – in a sense of a loss of its object. There is a tension between a hard surface presence and the representation of endless, deepest emptiness, tension which reflects impossibility and an actual failure to record anything. The appearance of drawing/drawn lines underlines that indirectness and inadequacy of memory transmission in relation to previously perceived reality, which is accessible to our inspection through reconstruction and speculation over that which is gone.