Large Format Photographic Contact Prints
‘Avalanches, Starlings, Gnats’ is a photographic series that explores the relationship between the written word and corporeal act of spoken language. The images depict a series of amorphous glass objects placed precariously on slips of timber. The objects were created through the physical act of glass-blowing. In this instance, instead of steady blows to create functional objects, these objects are the result of words being spoken into the glass blowing apparatus, resulting in strange objects that index the plosive words, lung capacity, oral cavity and body of the speaker. As such, they are physical registers of the corporeal dissipation of energy, air and atoms bound up in spoken communication.
The spoken words are sourced from Virginia Woolf ’s novel ‘To the Lighthouse’. The placement of the objects formally ‘quotes’ the mise-en-scène of feminist Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow’s 1971 seminal ‘Photosculpture’ series, where she used ephemeral wads of chewing gum cast by the cavity of her mouth to form little abstract/abject sculptures which she subsequently photographed and fixed on photographic paper.
In referencing Woolf and Szapocznikow, the piece seeks to bring to the fore the the bodily and unstable corporeal elements that belie the clean abstraction of language.
