Water and Irigary's 'knowable and unknowable'

" ... when we are immersed in a new landscape, in an extraordinary cosmic manifestation, when we bathe in an environment that is simultaneously perceptible and imperceptible, knowable and unknowable, visible and invisible to us. we are then situated in a milieu, in an event that escapes our control, our know-how, our inventiveness, our imagination. And our response to this 'mystery' is or could be astonishment, wonder, praise, sometimes questioning, but not reproduction, repetition, control, appropriation.

"We want to have the entire world in our head, sometimes the entire world in our heart. We do not see that this gesture transforms the life of the world into something finished, dead, because the world thus loses its own life. A life always foreign to us, exterior to us, other than us. ...

"If we could analyze each element of energy that reaches us in the explosion of spring, we would lose the global state that we experience by bathing in it through all our senses, our whole body, our whole soul. ...

Luce Irigary, 2002 Between East and West

Babblings: Dipping into - or plunging through the water's surface with the camera allows an (albeit delayed) embodied experience of seeing the layers of conscious/subconscious/unconscious in the later viewing of the images trawled from below. The act of capturing this is more than recording a physical state - it is a trawling of the layered quality of consciousness. I pull up from below, treasures, the unknown, creatures/forms, alike the minotaur of ancient mythology. Shadow and light exist together (down there). 

From my (I)island [ I= Self / boat () ], through my eye [lens

] 'I' descend through a portal () and I 'see' through an inner eye what lives below the i(I)sland

(Watson's Heron Island Water Lens is perhaps another instance of this physical apprehending - revealing more than  phenomena)

islands ~ remembered, embodied + manifested

I am island / only - Islands have drawn and gathered souls for millenia. Crossing water, a mirror world rises in front of the boat - transporter of souls between worlds - circle,  cir-cum-navigate, cir-come, i-mmerse. I (i -land): King, Tasmania, then reluctantly stranded on a larger One where I found many.

Now islands, small /uninhabited/wild, console the island self; I-self
Viola plunged into water and claims domain over an Other world now reachable through technology alone, I claim two ancient vessels, body and boat to navigate my own psyche.

Somehow, a 'pre-literate' knowing returns on these journeys. Back to water, wilderness, watery forest, the forest of fairytales - unknown and known, hidden and revealed.

Then images trawl back the relics for remembering and forgetting

The myth and symbolism of the boat in Early Europe ...

Boat as a metaphor for transcendental energy and eternal life

Celestial vehicles of the divinities

Soul boat, traditional means of transport for the souls of the deceased over water

... boat a a symbol of the goddess, the Great Mother

Medvedev-Mead, I “Soul Boats,” The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 2005, 24:3, 10-28 (see abstract: http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1525/jung.1.2005.24.3.10)

 

Thought Experiments : navigations in time, light + space

Re-presentations are always more than mimetic; they embody personal psychologies (aesthetics/archetypes and perhaps, remnants of the collective unconscious) Are these the  ‘places’ where the liminal nature of self is held and caught – embodied in communicable form, uttering directly to the viewer. These dredgings from underwater / on the flux line / reflected on the moving surface of water, are both metaphoric and real, straight but made strange by perspective.

The liminal is a mysterious space much like the body, with similar associated fascinations and fears. On a metaphoric level Fear of the Deep and Fear of the Body trigger the same visceral reactions, they are places where psychological shadows lurk, an opportunities exist to engage the Other.

Navigating time, light and space, using still and video cameras and HD sound recording equipment, often at night, the images employ a poetic visual language with the intention of moving between the real and sur-real. The movement of the carrying vessel is both linear directed by intent through space, and unpredictable; caught in the natural flux of tide and swell. While the photograph records light and captures time, here the quality is timeless, catching only the natural world in image, but the sound is a layering of organic with mechanical thereby reconciling "maternal" time with linear time (Kristeva). In this sense also, the kayak/boat/vessel becomes an elliptical portal between there realities – both an ancient vessel and transportation vehicle for exploration, and an embodied symbol (archetype: portal/doorway/birth canal) (Medvedev-Mead). Peering below the waterline is akin to entering an Other space, an unremembered realm - familiar and potent.

It was a childhood ritual to go flounder hunting with my father on Saturday nights in Tasmania. Using underwater spotlights, the world opened up as we explored the waterways – clear water, clean white sands, fish, crustaceans, octopus, squid even sea dragons at times … then there were the long returns through the country by car headlight after a long Sunday drive – glimpses of trees, country, frogs in the rain, possums in verge hedges, Next, then photograph of a pink tee shirt in a rock pool at sunset at Angourie  in 1980 and the late night wanderings with camera flash and slide film in Low Head over the following years. I’ve had an ongoing fascination with the creation of what I call ‘atmospheric fallacies’ –  bringing back (imaginary) immersive spaces to share with others.

The work of Bill Viola was a powerful influence, conjuring the magic of water-filtered light and slowed sound, engaging the senses while exploring metaphysics and symbol. The haunting work Swell, by Patricia Piccinini also had a sharp impact on my thinking about art making, suggesting possible ways to explore notions of the real and the non-real in video works. Paralleling my photographic practice, I have also worked with drawing; internal landscapes of the body. The symbols of bones have appeared through my work over decades and the work of Linde Ivemey contains resounding elements of my personal aesthetic in relation to the body.

Using digital video, still images, sound and layered imagery, I intend to create a body of photographic and time-based pieces. The works will investigate notions of reality in flux. Like our bodies and  our imagination, our grasp of certainty is represented in layers formed from fragments of information. Individual images and video will be taken apart from their original context, reconstructed in order to probe other possibilities, and situated to provide catalysts for conjecture – a new immersive reality of the ‘in between’