Photographs

"All our memories remain with us.  A remembered past in becoming a mental picture coincides with, or becomes part of, our present".  

(Henri Bergson in Tarkovsky, p. 26)

'Reflections'

From my window I could look across the street to the building opposite.  Those windows did not give access to the interiors of the rooms and their inhabitants but instead reflected elements of the building I was standing in: mysterious and random splashes of colour and floating white tendrils. 

'Stairs, Libeskind's Museum in Berlin'

The three images below are products of an ongoing interest in architecture and experiments in the use of colour to create or enhance an illusion of depth in two dimensional works. Photographs of the interior of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin formed the starting point for printing stark monchrome images with certain architectural features picked out in flashes of colour.

Strong contrasts and sharp angles mirror the interior spaces designed to commemorate those who were taken away from Berlin in the 1940's leaving behind the empty space they should have continued to inhabit. The handrails shine in the light that enters through what Libeskind calls, 'the window configurations, which radically penetrate through the walls' (Daniel Libeskind, The Space of Encounter, 2001, p. 27).

The following images are also from the Jewish Museum in Berlin but in these the soft pastel greys, pinks and blues are the dominant feature. The combination of natural and artificial light create a gentle quailty that suggested doorways where there are none. This softness contrasts markedly with the sharp angles of the stairs and handrails and with the heaviness of the concrete slabs. Stairs leading up and down into space reinforce the sense of emptiness in the void.