Things Reappear (2026)
Preparatory explorations for MFA Graduation Show, July 2026
Obsolete scientific imagery, captured by analogue technologies, continues to capture my imagination. Here, I use diagrams and long exposure photographs from an old Astronomy text book, recycling the imagery to explore notions of how technology and explanatory diagrams mediate and facilitate our understanding and elicit states of awe and wonder, their two-dimensional papery surfaces - subject to disintegration, wear and time - describe concepts of the cosmos and the infinite expanse of the universe.
Long-exposure plate glass photographs, taken a hundred years ago, captured the light energy that travelled from distant nebula millions of light years away rendering it in the silver nitrate particles on the surface of the glass. In the intervening millennia, those stars may no longer exist. Printed in the pages of a book, left on a dusty shelf for decades until, once again light energy enables me to apprehend them.
The compulsion, not to read the texts, but decipher the images and diagrams, recreate them through obsolete photographic processes, drawing, screen printing and lithography, enables their reproduction, re-releasing them using light energy for them to be seen again, re-explored and reinterpreted by the viewer. This alludes to the cyclical nature of the cosmos, a Vedic notion of time, and the repetition and reiterations of knowledge, understood and then superseded by new technologies and insights.
Alongside this imagery, printed on glass rounds to replicate astronomical apparatus, a composition will continually loop, as an ambient background hum, using ‘sonified’ frequencies found in the cosmos and played on a viol de gamba, a now obsolete baroque instrument that enables us to perceive these vibrational frequencies.
Watch this space (‘scuse the pun) to see how this project progresses…