Entranced #14

Entranced #14 continues my practice-research into vision as relational: the “visual self” is not secured by resemblance, but comes into being through looking, through the ongoing exchange between my look and what I am looking at. Here, that exchange is staged through close examination of an ivy leaf and, as importantly, through the space surrounding it: the gap, or the feminist fitting room (Orcutt 2022) in which looking happens.

Formally, the work makes this explicit. Two images are digitally sandwiched, my iris/pupil and the “looked-at” shiny, veiny surface of the ivy, so that meaning is not delivered at a glance but has to be patiently worked for. The viewer is pulled into a peering posture, a kind of attentive leaning-in that echoes the method that produced the image: close observation as a way of knowing.

The resin hemisphere is not simply a display device. It behaves like an object that returns the look: glossy, ocular, insistently present. It asks the viewer to dwell with its surface; an intimate, reciprocal looking that activates the work in relationship among image, the viewer’s body, and the space that holds them.

In this sense, Entranced #13 sits squarely within my diffractive feminist methodology: practice as a means to think-with vision, and to test how a visual self is made, across layers, through encounter, in the space between.

ORCUTT, Elizabeth. 2022. Reflection and Photography: Materialising My[Visual]Self. University of the Arts London: Falmouth University.