To Breathe Light
2019
Archival pigment prints on baryta paper from 120mm negatives. 16"x22” each.
8 also included in a multimedia installation of floor light boxes.
To Breathe Light continues to my interest and research in time, memory, the senses, motion, and light through the use of colour filters and light as materials in image making. In this series of images, I use 120mm colour film along with colour filters and reflective surfaces as both filters and a mirror. Passing and moving the 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 function like imprints of the processes and materials used to make them. Producing 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 or digital reproduction.
Natalie Hunter wishes to acknowledge the generous
support of the Canada Council for the Arts in producing this body of work.