Before and After the Bang

Series of artworks produced as part of my ongoing PhD Art Practice research project – Diffracting reflection: performing the photographic in the age of climate-crisis.

The research project investigates how a photographic contemporary art practice can respond critically and imaginatively to the climate crisis, specifically to the global ice melt. It considers how the camera can be utilised, not only in its dominant mode as a representational tool to document the landscape in crisis, but performatively – to foreground questions of ontology, materiality and agency. The techno-material-imaginative research methodology draws on two main theories that in their formation are related to the optical – Karen Barad’s writing on diffraction (Barad 2007) and Howard Caygill’s concept of synechia (Caygill 2021). By paying attention to the formal and conceptual implications of the contemporary photographic apparatus, specifically the treatment of photons through the photographic process (their reflection, absorption, transformation and generation), the work explores how photographic materialities and technicities might be entangled with our psychological response to climate images.