The Lightstain Series
A collection of 26 C-type one of a kind prints in reclaimed domestic frames.
Shown across Lincolnshire at 2021 Visual Arts, Ropewalk and Abbey Walk Gallery, The Lightstain Series considers the familiar/strange, Heimlich/Unheimlich dialectic through manipulating image to bring about a different relation to context and reading.
In the world of The Lightstain Series, light is dark and darkness becomes light. A towel hangs drying across a radiator. A shadow filters from beneath a door. Someone was here, images proposing a voyeuristic path through that person’s home, sensing their absence, feeling a way through private space. Scenes are not staged, beds are not made, cushions are not plumped. The images speak of a lived-in, domestic space from an inverse perspective, surreal and strange, disrupting accepted presentations to propose new ways to seeing and viewing familiar forms.
Odd angles, juxtapositions of doors, mirrors, stairwells, and reverse light coincidences, sinister splashes of red in a glass door pane, the images are open to different readings, through the production of an intellectual uncertainty that invites the viewer to speculate on links with their own experience. Mundane details trigger recollection, imagination.
The images, in their strange familiarity, propose a meditation on space, place, and dwelling, as gestural spaces which may activate the unconscious transporting the viewer to other times and places. While some are open to narrative interpretation, others wilfully refuse to disclose their secrets without close attention. They are less readable, more abstracted, playing with ideas of how we read space, and provoking an oscillation between ideas of homely and unhomely and the strange disquietude at the heart of the uncanny.
Comprising twenty-six framed works, these domestic, yet other-worldly images are deliberately conceived to make meaning elusive as different elements are revealed through the gaze. Connections are made and undone in an examination and presentation of the ways in which the strange can become familiar, and the familiar can become strange in quotidian space.
Images have a deliberately forensic quality, presenting interior situations that may be studied over time. Empty of people, the works connect viewer to image through echoing situations commonplace to quotidian space, mirroring the viewer’s own relation to her/his private spaces of habitation.