Light Touch

insignia or tools on or below the surface of the soil in this remote woodland on the Russian western border. The implications of the film are uncomfortable, rendered more far-reaching given Morstang’s decision not to anchor the film to a specific story or to edit the film as a documentary. As a narrative of non-commemoration it reminds us that we are all implicated in inconvenient truths - things we would prefer to forget or ignore.

By contrast, Prosperous Mountain and her sequence of still images, The Road North, constitute a narrative of now and of what might come to pass. The set of images was made within half an hour.

Shifts in colors and in the way that light reflects on the ice in this far northern roadway testify poetically to fragility, transience and mutability. Glacial melt in the Arctic is contributing to sea rise; coastal communities in the northern hemisphere are directly affected. As with Lebas’ work, the images are beautiful in terms of composition and subtleties of color tone, but this is a paradoxical beauty as we find ourselves contemplating fragility, mutability, risk and loss.

The artists included in this exhibition variously respond to – and remind us of - the palette of the natural world, deploying color as a key aesthetic element within their work. Between them they span an almost complete spectrum of tones and hues, ranging from the hot ambers and reds in Marja Pirilä’s pictures to the cooler pale greys, blues and light pinks that characterize work by Lebas and Morstang.

Pirilä has been exploring the colors and movement of natural light, and related aesthetic and emotional affects, for many years. She is also interested in early camera and lens technologies. For her series Like a Breath in Light (2002/4), she used a pinhole camera, held on her knees, for long exposures as she sat silently in the same place overlooking a lake in the Finnish heartland, waiting for images that gradually take form.9 The soft edges that characterize the colors in the pictures arise from her breathing very slightly shifting the camera. Hung behind glass they have an ethereal quality that is contemplative, poetic and evocative. For me the stillness suggests ecological and spiritual harmony. Place is not specific in her work. Rather her concerns are with our relation to light and shade, shadow and reflection. In a further series, Interior/Exterior, she created Camera Obscuras (dark rooms) in everyday apartments using plastic sheeting over windows to block out light.10 She inserted a convex lens within the black-out material; the scene from outside was thus reflected inside. A camera set-up within the darkroom was used to photograph the room’s inhabitant indoors bathed in the reflected outdoor scene. Like the chink in Plato’s Cave that forms a starting point for Sontag’s reflections on the world seen through photographs, we reflect on the curious inter-relation of interior and exterior.

Speaking House uses a similar method, but in a building with particular resonances as it is the abandoned, uninhabited, deteriorating interior space of a former mental asylum, recognizable as such from an institutional bed frame, or an old wooden chair. What is particularly extraordinary is the range of colors within the yellow-amber-brown-red spectrum that appear. The imagery in Speaking House evokes a range of emotions that cannot be explained simply in terms of photographic transcripts of melodious color effects. The outside world is drawn inside, the external setting overlaid on the internal scenarios; the effect is unsettling, more so when we remember that this was a place of confinement for those with mental issues. Again we are reminded of human fragility. Light is transient. So are we.

9 www.marjapirila.com/breathe_in_light_ins.html 10 www.marjapirila.com/interior.html; Marja Pirilä (2002) CAMERA OBSCURA Interior/Exterior, Helsinki: Musta Taide.