Christine Cornish
“My work over the last two decades has been mostly studio based, blending painting and drawing with photography and exploring the self-consciousness of individual perception, particularly connections between perception, memory and knowledge. I see subjective vision as something enmeshed in rules, codes and practices, and emerging from culture and science rather than from any understanding of perception itself. My images combine real and simulated spaces with objects that suggest ephemeral cultural phenomena. I aim to convey the inextricable yet abstruse materiality of things that make up our ordinary daily experiences.
Modulating the images, through layering and drawing before photographing, is a way of distancing materiality from the material and objects from their origins and their objectness. This involves a gradual emptying and veiling of the subject. Central to this process is my interest in Blanchot’s notion of disappearance as a poetic concept and Bergson’s observation of a substance's identity, duration and alteration as ‘a way of being in time that is at least partially revealed in the process of its dissolving’. I have also been interested in Heidegger’s perception of ‘unshieldedness’, ‘concealedness’ and the interdependency of presence and absence.”
(Christine Cornish 2006)
