temaceleste: self portrait
2000
Unable to fall asleep at night: tossing and turning from side to side, hitting the pillow, counting sheep, thinking of beautiful places, trying to control ones breathing. Everything that seems insignificant in daytime suddenly attains overblown importance. The unfinished letter, the job left undone, the tactless comment to a friend, all become indelible character flaws rather than the little slip ups anyone might be guilty of. What is it that makes the nighttimes so different from the day?
Perhaps it is related to being deprived of visual information. With no distractions there is nothing left to ponder but yourself. The night has a mysterious power. It draws you in and leaves you exposed. In fact all you senses are heightened. I want my photographs to appeal to the imagination in the same way the night does. Some of my photographs such as dreamscape 1, pick up on this intensity through the use of colour; in others it may be present in the suggestion of a dreamlike, moody quality. The photographs are seductive and unsettling, strange and not quite believable. They might have been manipulated-the colours are too intense or the light is not quite right-yet again, maybe they haven’t. I have always been interested in that kind of ambiguity, the play between fact and fiction, imagination and reality.
The contrast between darkness and light plays a very active role in my photographs. There are large areas of blackness where only very little is made visible. By leaving so much “in the dark” I hope to trigger the viewers imagination. You start to wonder what this darkness might be hiding. There is a narrative sense within the work, that something just happened or is about to happen, that there is something hidden which might or might not be revealed. It is not unlike the suspense created in thrillers where violent scenes are so often suggested rather than described.
The photographs are similar to film stills. There is the sense that the gaze has brushed over a frozen moment and caught a fleeting glimpse of an apparition, from a dream perhaps. It is like the experience of speeding along a highway, which creates this odd combination between motion and stillness. Half-asleep, half-awake, one stares out of the window of a car, watching the streetlights or the road markings rush by like a continuous luminous flickering line. It’s the kind of experience that transports you into a mesmerizing, meditative state of mind. Totally absorbed within yourself; gaze unfocused turned inward, mind flowing freely.