To Breathe Light
Natalie Hunter
To breathe light
2019
Archival pigment prints on backlight film mounted in 4 double sided custom floor light boxes (plexiglass, poplar, LED lighting, hardware).
To breathe light continues to my interest and research in time, memory, the senses, motion, through the use of light as a material in image making. In this series of floor sculptures, I use 120mm colour film along with colour filters and metallic surfaces as both a filter and a mirror. Passing and moving these materials in front of the camera lens as I make my exposure disrupts, bends, and activates light entering the camera; producing subtle shifts in colour, physicality, and distortion. The resulting images are soft, imperfect, experimental, and ethereal multiple exposures that contain mirror imagery of my surroundings in addition to what I’m looking at with a lens. Each double exposure is made roughly within the space of a breath. Recording the act of breathing - 2 seconds inhale and 3 seconds exhale - where the camera looks outward from the body toward the sky or through a window. The images in To breathe light are housed in double-sided floor light boxes and function like objects experienced in the round. Producing physical encounters that speak to the slowness of time and the process of recording an experience that relates more to the rhythms of the body than it does to mechanical reproduction.
Natalie Hunter wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts in producing this body of work.