Simone Douglas
"The key concern of my work is to develop a contemporary understanding of, and visual response to, the photographic in relation to the sublime, excess and immateriality. I seek to explore a slippage in visual certainty in the photographic image.
I have looked at different modes of visual knowledge, and then at how notions of image, perception and illusion can create a vocabulary for representing the not known. My visual research also takes into consideration scientific reason and mythical illusions in their like attempts to make sense of that which is at the margins of our rational understanding. It has been a conscious decision to use various photographic approaches in the visual exploration and research.
Working with various photographic approaches allows me to consider the slippage between the real as perceived and the representational power of the photographic image and its evasive status. Photographs are of something. They have an analogous relationship to reality, with indexicality commonly seen as a condition of the medium. I wish to make visible a laggard oscillation between the recognisable and the abstract, and to create a tension between the (assumed) physical presence of the observer and the presumptions of (assumed) perception of the medium. I am looking at the tension created by our desire for meaning – a material connection between photography and the lived reality of the experiential world – to bring to self-consciousness the very process and act of our perceiving."
(Simone Douglas 2006)
