All solid shapes dissolve in light

These photographs consider the tension between holding fast and letting go, balancing intentionality with chance through fixing and fading.

All solid shapes dissolve in light is about the impossible desire to secure things through pictorial, sculptural and biological reproduction. These photographs consider the struggle between holding fast and letting go, balancing intentionality and will with chance and the unknown through fixing and fading. Photographs of supposedly solid subjects such as rock formations, fragmented plaster cast statues, my hands, my mother’s hands, and my plaster cast hands were made by exposing paper dyed with lichen to the sun outdoors.  The exposure of these fading pictures takes weeks to months depending on the time of year, and is as simple as curtains fading in windows over time. The highlights are formed through the breakdown of dye molecules that travel through a positive transparency pressed in contact with the paper under glass.  When the dyed paper has faded enough for the image to form, the transparency is removed to reveal the unfixable image made through its own disappearance.  Each print in the variable editions has unique color and contrast, as the process is capricious. The hands and fragments are printed life size in high detail to accentuate the near presence of the subject, and to therefore also heighten its absence.

As an experiment in using the subject as the medium, these purple pictures are made by fading lichen dye, chosen because of its inherent connection to the subject matter. Lichen echoes the slowness of the printing process, and grows on rocks.  The resulting images vary in magenta, violet, blue hues and cannot be fixed.  The same light that made the images continues to fade them as they are viewed.  The only way to preserve these images is to keep them hidden.  These fading photographs are presented alongside relatively permanent silver gelatin and inkjet prints to emphasize the constant shifting of all photographs through time and context.  When the image fades away entirely, a pale color will be left on the paper.  I like to think that this ghost image is just as valuable, if not more, than the visible one, because it holds time and opens up space for imagining. 

Containing a spectrum of representational to abstract images, All solid shapes dissolve in light emphasizes the way that all images oscillate between moving and still, visible and invisible.  Viewers often ask what the fading pictures will look like over time and how long they will last.  I prefer to leave this to our experience and imagination.  Just as it’s impossible to predict how long a person will live, it’s impossible to anticipate all the variables in the lifespan of a print.  As the project has continued, purely abstract images have been added.  I found pieces of paper stored in my flatfile drawers that had been dyed with impermanent plant dyes five to ten years ago and never exposed to the sun.  Abstract images formed on the papers as they were exposed to air in the shifting stacks over time without my knowledge.  Exhibiting these chance exposures with the other representational photographs frames a space for accepting change, as practice for accepting the emptiness and openness in all images.