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.
