Dark Energy

Inspired by the celestial, Dark Energy explores the dynamic tension between the known and the perhaps unknowable, obscurity and revelation. Playing with light, time and space, this experimental body of work evokes notions of expansion and possibility.

The cosmos and our place within it has always inspired the deepest curiosity and sense of awe. Staring up at the night sky, sensing the earth slowly turning, our awareness of infinity could disorient and overwhelm us. And yet, conversely, with gravity as our seatbelt, ‘sky country’ has a way of calming and anchoring us.

In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is an enormous, yet invisible, mysterious force accelerating the expansion of the universe. While our experience of the cosmos is timeless and ‘universal’, we also experience it through place; from the grounding point of an earthly landscape.

As a portal to knowledge of ‘sky country’, for settler scientists and astronomers and its original indigenous inhabitants, Canberra’s Mount Stromlo, Ngunnawal country, holds deep significance. Inspired by Mount Stromlo, Dark Energy investigates the invisible, but felt, forces of interconnectedness and energy – between us, the earthly world and the celestial. Through experimental darkroom work, it explores the dynamic tension between the known and the perhaps unknowable, between obscurity and revelation, playing with magic elixirs of light and time, matter, energy and space – evoking notions of universal expansion and possibility.

The Dark Energy body of work, created as a Dark Matter artist-in-residence at Canberra’s PhotoAccess, explores the idea of the celestial through the layering of images and techniques. Incorporating archival material, found objects and botanical matter collected on Mount Stromlo, and combining projected photographic negatives with cameraless methodology (photograms), each image is a unique-state silver gelatin print.