Light, Line & Lore

Light Line and Lore ; On going ; Extracts being shown at Cork Photo 2015

Fairies have long been a subject for photography since it’s inception, with Fox Talbot describing his early photographs as ‘fairy pictures’. There is a strong link between shadows and fairies, both are impossible to capture and they are ciphers for ideas about transgression, liminal states, the intangible. Within the tradition of fairy folklore is a strong preoccupation with boundaries between one world and the other. As my work considers the line between shadow and light, a line difficult to trace and identify I am considering the mystery of this ‘non area’, and relating it to the photographic latent image, the undeveloped area of light caught between times of capture in the darkroom. The work is being made with reference to Derrida in ‘Athens Still Remains’, this book is short and questions whether the boundary between light and shadow constitutes a line, this meditation is the conceptual origin for Light Line and Lore. The site of the bush determines where this line will be, as it was ‘borne from a seed that was never planted’, mythically , it has no known referent. In Light Line and Lore I am working along this metaphorical resonance with the loss of indexicality, exploring how verbal histories, folklore and legends are stored in the memory and age with the ebb and flow of the memory keeper.