Field Notes
(2024)
Embedded Files
An exploration of art and process, the clinical and the intangible, through pinhole photography, with reference to gothic and eldritch horrors.
Addressing:
The Surveyor
The Institute has requested a study of the fall of light upon select locations at various times across the span of several days.
The survey is to be completed with record of notable observations of occurrences during the procedure.
Sender:
The Secretary for the Head of The Institute
At the creep in a sunlight patch at the bottom of the stairs was what one may describe as a splotch. They occur from time to time—a spill of chemicals, an over-indulgence of light. When at first glance I beheld, I put it to some conniption in the development process. Yet something about the shapes caught my attention. Tubular forms, like parsnips plucked from the soil.
Whatever purpose these arcane buildings may once have been put to use for, the notion could not escape me that it had not been for the growing of root vegetables.
A curious presence. A most peculiar anomaly—a mere play of the light. No matter be it what these vestiges may be. The capturing of photographic imprints is an erroneous procedure, the very way wrought with wretched tribulations at every turn.
And yet—something about the shape, this obscene presence tainting the fabric of the image, sits uneasily upon my mind.
I cannot let this notion—this indulgence of fancy—run away with me. Only with further study can I let myself be sure.
And as per the instruction of The Institute, further study I must perform.
Field Notes draws from conventions of gothic and eldritch horrors, exemplified in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and renowned writer and racist H. P. Lovecraft. Pinhole images are presented alongside written fragments influenced by historic genre conventions. The union of media is presented in the context of a dossier — a forensic examination. A meta-commentary emerges in the narrative’s consideration of processes.
There are dominant notions of understanding — a Western scientific — which emphasise the clinically discernable as the only knowledge. Through this I perceive a resulting separation from worldly attunement, a loss of the knowledges of our bodies, our souls, our existences as individuals and as elements of collectives. It is crucial to note that clearly articulated thought is not the only form of knowing; felt understanding is understanding.
In Field Notes, a scientific clinical meets a figure intangible — and the fictitious narrator’s world disintegrates. Fascination leads to supernatural ecstasy, recalling Charlotte Perkins Gilmore’s The Yellow Wallpaper — itself a critique of still too-relevant patriarchal attitudes.
Field Notes presents an embodiment of art and process, viewed through a fictitious lens demonstrating a disintegration of the clinical scientific in favour of the intangible, serving as a critique of historic genre precedents and a challenge to ongoing systemic social structures of oppressions. As physical prints, there is a focus on the material, the tangible embodiment of a non- or differently-tangible.
Stretching to the bottom of the stairs is a shape. It is most distinct. A cylinder or a jagged rectangle, leading down to four or five branching appendages. In the red light, at first I see it is an error in the processing, a mark or lack thereof where the developer fluid did not touch the page. It happens from time to time, when one is distracted—yet I am not distracted, it may also occur due to myriad other circumstances.
It is an arm, held without presence of body.
I would suspect the assistants of some practical joke—oftentimes when one works in the shared picture developing space, one will find one’s print’s are shifted without one’s command or permission, but that is the undergrads for you—but alone as I am in my task here, this cannot be so.
For myself as a practitioner, I find a degree of spirituality through photographic arts — a communion with light and the world through the mediator of the lens. The darkroom exemplifies this — light and shadow are interacted with in a liminal vault.
In pinhole processes, the lens is absent. I find a separation here, a yielding of control — of giving self over to the process. An urge overcomes me: to perform as a creature. To embody these processes, to give tangible form to some stirring within, however pretentious this may sound.
It is the capturing of the light upon the page. Yet there is nothing there to see. The paper sees more than I do. Yet it cannot be true.
What if there is some lurking there, some creature, some monstrosity? This coalescing light. What if it—a ghost—makes its haunting passage, where only I shall see?
Or if it should choose where it shall be seen and where it shall not, then why does it fall upon myself to behold it in all its trembling grace?
It embodies itself upon my page. It is seeking its way—where?
The project granted a welcome return to the darkroom space — a space I have found some degree of spirituality in. It was undertaken as I developed short film Safelight. Darkroom creatures and traumas were lingering in back and front of my mind.
It is a hatching. It hatches from itself, hatches anew of its skin with each pull of the shutter. The skin is but the trace facets, the container for this light within, this glorious beyond. I see it now. The flesh is a prison it discards. It emerges, it creeps, it creeps, it crawls. It sings with the dark and hunts with the light. Can you hear it?
This place it wanders. This hinterland on the knife cusp of dark and light. The borders of our world it transcends. It rides the light, it is the light, the light spills to shadow, and it hatches again, and again, an endless cycle of repetitions, agitations.
This frenzy—a cacophony of light. Can you hear it?
Can you hear me?
Field Notes was displayed within a glass case in the Massey Pukeahu campus library. The most perfect exhibition context. To entrap these explorations and fictions in glass, to look upon them as though in a museum — often an imperial instutionalised way of seeing artifcats and knowledge — was an incredibly serendipitious opportunity, a great extension and exemplification of the underlying nature of the project.
Time bleeds as one.
The length of a moment is the length of the exposure.
Echoes rebound off distant shores innumerable—forward and back.
The camera sees all. Scavenging through time, a shroud.
I burst forth from my skin.
I am a frenzy of light. I am the play of shadow upon glass. I am the sunbeam which holds the motes of dust as they spin and spiral and fall, and fall, and fall.
I hunch down in the dirt like the beasts scavenging for fungal spores and I crawl on my arms like the beetles in their myriads and I creep and groan like the trees shaking under crooked wind and finally I can breathe.
Finally I can see—
Through the shutter.
And the light—it nourishes.
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