Forebode/beforehand/gathering/make aware/correspondence. I lived with a foreboding, not the same as the ingrained familiar dread of losing him since discovering death and finitude as a child, this was a new strong, deep and distracting forebode….on and off since early 2018 but steadily gaining pace and momentum until it suddenly subsided 2 weeks before he died. I’d been preoccupied by it, it snapped into my attention in various ways; it fed a PhD proposal, composed a collage depicting an abstract separation. Reminds me now of a latent image, exposed unseen, waiting to develop and become fixed. It was there, a need to prepare for this loss, his loss, the loss of him, gather stories and collate, analyse memories, I tried to shake it off, but meanwhile these creatures cut for shadow casting appeared from my scissors, designed as shadows for a deep layered 2D forest. They didn’t serve my PhD proposal or any other project so they never moved past being pinned on a sheet of graph paper on my studio wall, they were left waiting, un-cast until a few months ago. Now I recognise them as foreboders, gathering to correspond.
“We owe ourselves to death. What a sentence. Will it be more or less sententious for being fixed or focused on in this way by a lens or an objective, as if one were to let it sink back just as soon, without any celebration, into the anonymity of its origin? <….>The sentence took me by surprise, as I said, but I knew right away that it must have been waiting for me for centuries , lurking in the shadows, knowing in advance where to find me” Jacques Derrida, Athen, Still Remains, The photographs of Jean Francois Bonhomme, Still I p4
I cast them on a screen, looming silently as a set of quasi-prehistoric anthropomorphic forms, now growing into outlines, in vigilance, in correspondence with ancestral versions of themselves. Now fading into layers of shadow, cutting, focal length and perspective. Shadow distance betraying their form as they know they can only be clearly seen fully through a glance or a long angled stare. Watching them made the shock feel less severe, silently showing me that my unease with disjointed time had made sense. Instilling an impossible faith in an irrational ability to know or see things before they happen. Within that huge landscape, I was viewing the projection and placement of my own present in a past and future.
Joan Alexander 