Vanishing Point
Driving home one night, I noticed an animal writhing in agony by the side of the road. I impulsively looked into the rearview mirror to reassure myself. In the dark back seat, my sleeping son's faint outline and the sound of his steady breathing eased my sense of foreboding. But the image of the wounded animal haunted me. The next morning, I re-traced my route to where I had seen it. Beside the road a large bag of refuse lay carelessly discarded. A gust of wind lifted the dark plastic and it fluttered and writhed.

The work Vanishing Point is an exploration of the theme of separation anxiety, encompassing both physical and emotional separation.

Each of the photographs in the installation is printed on a large piece of transparent film and suspended in space. The ephemeral quality of the lighting, the obvious fragility of the materials, suggest that the viewer's relationship to both subject and object is transient. The transparency of the film hints at an elusive presence that is as unstable and impermanent as photographic materials themselves are thought to be. The images are hung closely enough together that the viewer's movement creates air currents that make them move. They ripple and flutter, like the garbage bag by the side of the road. They respond to the subtlest of disturbances, like emotional indexes. They overlap, partially obscuring but also partially revealing what lies behind and beyond. These prints have to be physically negotiated for an unencumbered view, in the anxious search for an illusory answer, a denied resolution.

This work was prompted by the artist's own experience of the intense bond that is the mother/child matrix, of the emotions of love and loss that accompany that bond. The images are intended to be read, in Roland Barthes' words, "not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think." (Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida, p.21)  An image of a forest or a shadow on the floor can provoke anxiety. What lies lifeless by the side of the road also has the potential to prick and to wound.

Click the images to enlarge.