Entranced #15

Entranced #15 continues my practice-research into vision as a relational process. Rather than being secured through resemblance, the “visual self” comes into being through looking; through the ongoing exchange between my look and what I am looking at. In this work, that exchange is staged through contemplation of sand shaped by a rivulet, and, crucially, through the surrounding space in which this looking takes place: the gap, or what I have termed the feminist fitting-room (Orcutt, 2022), where vision is negotiated and meaning emerges.

Formally, the work makes this explicit. Two images are digitally sandwiched, my iris/pupil and the granular surface of the sand through and around the water, 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 the 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.