Tabula Rasa II

About

The passage of time and its effects on place, self, memory, and history are paramount in the work of these 5 artists and their engagement with the photographic process which are explorative, and distinct.

Alan Knox’s work confronts the point when life passes from contingency to finality and documenting the material process he used to mark the death of his grandfather. Making large black and white negatives from his family archive, he backlit them to the moon, then photographed them at each stage of the lunar cycle. Kotryna Ula Kiliulyte’s project seeks also for something she knows she won’t find: home, a ‘fictional room,’ as she states, ‘that glows warmly, promising the feeling of belonging, of truth, of unity.’ Frank McElhinney deals with the accretions of history embodied in landscapes in a series of works exploring forced migration of Scots for their crofting roots. The land recurs again in Stephen Healy’s series of square black and white prints of close ups of tree roots made strange by their intimate detail. Julia Bauer’s series of pinboards  on the other hand explore institutional spaces - focused on the tiny marks accumulated on the boards over time, her prints become ‘small relief sculptures,’ as she puts it, or ‘galaxies,’ a natural analogy between micro and macro for an artist who, as a jeweller, works instinctively with touch and trace.