Dust Passing (Negative and Positive VIIII) 2009

From the Three Magic Particles Series 2009-12

Pinhole Photographic Paper Negatives and Positives on Fibre-Based Paper

Dimensions approx 50 x 120 cms

Dust Passing, and The Three Magic Particles: Light, Dust, and (Photographic) Grain began with the quest to make my own version of Man Ray’s Dust Breeding - my pursuit of an elusive image.

Using a large pinhole camera obscura, this series explores duration and the documentation of time through the play of light, dust, and the body. Playing with ideas of suspension (of time, dust, the body) and inversion (time, the body, the image, reversal, upside-down, positive/negative).

In an image, I wished to do the impossible: to capture the passage of the suspending magical particles, to hold time and possibility in a photograph. As Celeste Olalquiaga says in “The Artificial Kingdom”, “Dust is what connects the dreams of yesteryear with the touch of nowadays. It is the aftermath of the collapse of illusions, a powdery cloud that rises abruptly and then begins falling on things, gently covering their bright, polished surfaces.”

I wanted to prevent this downward journey and keep it in the air. But as things fall and land there is no turning back, decisions are made and things enter in the past, a place from which they cannot return. If we can keep things up in the air, the possibilities are endless…