INTERFACE

REVIEW

Lightfall

The Phillips Gallery, Taunton
17 April – 22 May


Reviewed by: Deborah Robinson »

'Lightfall' is an exhibition of striking beauty. Images by each of the four artists on show have physical qualities that are unusual in photography: sumptuous colour appears to permeate light-sensitive paper in a manner more readily associated with painting. Through the exploration of liquids and light – the primal elements of photography – a subtly different vision emerges to that usually encountered in mainstream photographic work.

In Thoughts of the Night Sea, Gary Fabian Miller manipulates light, which he shines through vessels filled with water onto colour-positive paper creating intense horizontal bands of blue. These images loosely reference seascapes but also evoke the emotional tone of Rothko's painting through saturation of colour. Susan Derges recently worked with landscape directly as a part of her King's Wood series. Here, the passage of sunlight is directly tracked over a twelve-hour period using a pinhole camera set up on the forest floor, producing an arc of light that cuts across the solid, dark canopy of trees. Neil Reddy positions multiple arcs and vortices of flickering light against vibrant coloured surfaces by setting up a mechanical performance in the darkroom. Working 'blind' he draws pinholes of light in and out of focus with only the camera as witness to the event. Finally, Susie Needham's innovative experimentation with layered imagery carried out in direct sunlight creates a haze of violet and golden yellow. In these poignant images plant forms are spliced with ghostly historical imagery derived from museum artefacts and family photographs.

Photography tends to focus on the role of the lens in the surveillance and objectification of the external world. For the artists in 'Lightfall', restraints placed on photographic materials in order to service lens-based imagery is lifted, and the medium subsequently becomes an intriguing subject of exploration in its own right.

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