The Gloaming

The gloaming is the space between day and night, that edge of twilight when the sun recedes and the stars open up. It is a hinterland, an in-between place where light and space can deform and rupture. This work speaks to that edge of possibility, of uncertainty, of disappearance. In the over the mid-summer of 2023, Jenni and I (amongst others) were invited to an artists residency on a farm in the Netherlands. Days were spent discussing art, creating, experimenting and playing chess. As evening fell we would often walk out across the nearby marshlands, as all manner of waterfowl and other birds came back to settle for the night. It was during this residency that I began to develop my mirror-scanning technique, using photogrammetry to explore that in-between space of the mirrors surface. One day I asked Jenni to pose for me holding a mirror whilst I attempted to scan her. I have no idea what went wrong, but the resulting pointcloud was bizarre, the landscape became stretched and Jenni herself was entirely absent – she had disappeared from the scan. We tried again the next day with different lighting, and I processed the scan a little differently. This time she was present - but the strange pointillist nature of these scans flattens space giving her a ghostly appearance. For 2.5 years I did nothing with this scan, not knowing quite how to use it, until Jenni mentioned this project. It seemed like the perfect subject for a meditation on the artists presence, absence, and that brief flicker in between.