Cinders

_{Cinders II Sky; HD Projection}

_{Cinders I Pyre ; HD Projection}

 

_{Cinders III; Installed jar & Projected 120mm slide; Fabrica Gallery 2015}

Cinders connects the shadow with burning ash and considers the absence of what is past (burnt) in its presence (cinders). The work conceptually draws on Derrida’s writing in ‘Cinders’ and relates it to Carol Mavor’s discussion of the shadow without a referent in ‘Summer Was Inside the Marble’; this shadow is without  referent because the referent was incinerated in the Hiroshima atom bomb. She relates this to a memory that must be told, but in a radically different way because the ‘image’, this shadow, is no longer indexical.

To begin this line of inquiry Alexander used actual cinders and treated them ‘photographically’,  literally and metaphorically. Gathering cinders between 2012-2014 from her family home she worked with them in the darkroom, outdoors and sculpturally.

Filmed remnants of burning paper// Series of latent images installed in light proof pouches// Archived ashes in a round glass jar// Projected slide // Diptych of varying exposures and orientations installed on shelf.

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