Conversations with My-Self and Others

Conversations with My-Self and Others


These Conversations percolated during pandemic-induced lockdown. After previously only photographing outdoors, Lisa Stonham turned her lens inward, seeking out arrangements of painterly light, colour and texture in interior settings for the first time.

Chromatic arrangements carry the viewer into these compositions, inviting them to seek out anchor points between translucent layers of light. Within these seemingly abstract compositions lurk clues to scale. Screws, floorboards or power-points cast these light-based gestures in relation to the absent body.

Colour’s changeability is highlighted, literally, in Stonham’s photographs, where the truth stretches from deep shadows to mid-tones to blinding saturation. Burgundy is simultaneously tangerine; lime is lemon. Our eyes navigate these cuts of colour as if being transported through the threshold of plastic ribbons in the doorway of a takeaway shop.

Stonham’s works echo the subjectivities of colour and light in the memory and mind’s eye. Accidental compositions at their core, their layers linger in our vision like a sunlit afterimage.

Chloé Wolifson, August 2022