Leeds University

I am inside myself. I am inside the world. I am above and around everything my senses allow me to understand. I am waking-walk-waking-walking. Vibration of a conscious mind. Of my own creating. Of my own forming of this physical world. ‘Multiply faceted ambivalence. The presence of mutually conflicting thoughts and feeling after all…to embrace duality and contradiction’[1] but when it all boils down to it what are facts? Are these facts what I am seeking to achieve? Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This was once a fact, like the earth was once a flat. Disproven over time. What else could we believe in that could be proven wrong? I worry about my memories.

There is this place I want to be in, or on, or maybe just hanging down and looking at the view. Quantum physic scientists call this place ‘The Field’. Albert Einstein would have insisted this place was the fastest speed that exists. Einstein was wrong, maybe the quantum physicians are wrong too. But I am not dealing in pure facts, but the facts and fictions. The Field is my ideal holiday destination. The place that is a boundary between the physical plane, which is everything our five senses can feel. The facts that we can touch, like the chair I sit on and the smell of the flower that sits on my desk. Then we have what is above The Field, which is the metaphysical plane; everything we are able to sense in our dreams, the spiritual world and our emotions. These ideas have been around for hundreds of years before the quantum physicians started looking into it; from the poetic language of mysticism from the scholars of Kabbalah and the Sanskrit pundits. Fictions that are proven to be facts, or maybe they still lie in fictions.

If we start in the physical, the slow vibration of life, what is fixed or slowly moving? The vibrations move faster up toward the field (the speed of light) and up faster and faster over the field and into the metaphysical; the emotional plane or the astral plane, which it is also known as. If you raise the vibration fast enough you will get to the source, to that which started the vibrations. This place has interested me for sometime, as a place where moments form within. A physical act that vibrates upwards into moments, into the subconscious and out of my reach. I feel that I can be a tourist in this field by standing between both my physical self and the self to which ascends up past the point of my senses. In there, if I catch these moments and mold them onto the surface of an image, I will find something that has always been there, which I have never seen before; I need to see them differently. I want to be a tourist in the field and somehow to take my camera and find these moments and picture them, and be pictured in them, as ‘essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality and eventually in ones own’.[2] Photography plays with our memories, turning them into not only facts, but fictions transformed into an object.

[1] Liz Rideal, Mirror, mirror: self-portraits by women artists/ Liz Rideal ; with essays by Whitney Chadwick and Frances Borzello (London : National Portrait Gallery, 2001), p.157

[2] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 57.

When we are born ‘each of us is simultaneously the beneficiary of our cultural heritage and the victim of it’[1] from the cities and countries we were brought up in, from our own parents, or guardians. Certain aspects of who we are are built into us; from there we start to mold our personal identities. Things we believe we know about ourselves, our likes and dislikes and things we seek to find out like hobbies and interests. Though we inherit something against our will it doesn’t mean we necessarily understand what it means. Many things filter into our subconscious, forming behavior we cannot always explain. Between memories and moments, the facts and fictions of our past develop and unfold into our futures.

How is it possible to understand a pre-set blue print to our lives if they are locked away and hidden? Most of us do not even consider these blue prints to even exist. Paradoxically the more we search for the answers to questions about ourselves, the more questions we end up finding. Questions after questions about who we are, why we are here and how did we become the people we are today?

The idea I am most interested in is not the life shattering point that we know has had impact but the little moments we experience in life that somehow have greater impact on the people we become. Recounting moments in my past, these vague moments I cannot really recall, I sometimes wonder if they did really happen. Perhaps from being told over again, seeing them in pictures, hearing other people recount them, they have taken on another form. The fragments of truths and imaginary moldings of who we are, who we become. I want to recount these moments.

Moments are physical, whereas memories are visual. A moment is something we feel we cannot change by visual information; it also cannot be remembered after it happens. All moments are easy to forget, as they have no true visual substance; they are emotions that are utterly disjointed to recall. They all filter into our subconscious, forming patterns in our personality and learnt lessons that now become instinctive in our lives. But what are all these moments we save, how have they molded us into people?

Maybe I can find my answer in the cracks of these moments, the place where they form. In their births or their deaths. Suspended between two worlds, finding out something new by photographing it. Photography has been an aid to change the way we see. What can photography tell me about myself, what can the camera see that I cannot? This is what I wish to explore.

[1] Susan Hiller, Susan Hiller : the revenants of time / an essay by Jean Fisher on the artist’s time-based work (London: Matt’s Gallery, 1990), p. 23.

Where did it all come from, these atoms of self-consumption? Work so hard to make it all real and nice but you look back on reflection, in reflection. You see a girl you preferred just that little bit maybe a lot-of-bit more.

When did this all start, as a question? Or before the question? Start again. Crawl through your blood stream expanding your soul and leaving in your trail a place where blood use to be.

Give it a name. Yours would be good, in a dream it all made sense. Did I not say I had a dream about you? We were lost in the area formed before moments. It was calm. In these cracks of moments. Moments of intangible freedom from images and sense. A space of forgotten feelings that molds us into who we have become. A life filled so compactly with these moments. Compactly forgotten.

In this space I wasn’t allowed to question.

Each time I tried you just smiled in that way to let me know it was okay.

But was it okay. And why did it matter.

You smiled.

I smiled.

But it was just a dream.