Sculpting with Light: A photographic that is shifting

Abstract

This research paper explores an expanded field of photography that dismantles and reconfigures itself in order to highlight its core elements: light, time and space. The research paper examines artists who illuminate and provoke awareness of the ‘limitless’ through the conduit of photography. The paper considers photography’s capacity to destabilise and expand perceptions, provoking larger questions. We come to see how photography has the potential to grapple with the spiritual and ‘eternal’. The paper reflects upon photography’s role to capture and transform light, both visible and invisible to the human eye. It can be concluded that photography expands our understanding of space and time, transforming energy into matter. The study of this expanded terrain of photography informs my practice.The studio work presented for examination expands upon the notion of photography towards one that sculpts with light. Concerned with the light trace, the installation titled Sculpting with Light will be exhibited at the Sydney College of the Arts Postgraduate Exhibition in December 2013. The works demonstrate a shifting photographic practice, considering light and time through still, moving image and sound media. Through projecting light and further refracting it (from a data projector to perspex on the floor), vibrations and reverberations (of distant radio waves), the works act as a shifting sculpture. Forming, degrading and reforming, the works reconsider the camera and its ability to sculpt with light. Materiality is central to the work, and how materiality's content and meaning unfold over time. Sculpting with Light is a reflection upon contemporary photographic practice; perpetually transforming the light trace. Meditative, experiential, through these works we passage.