Threadsuns

“The work takes its name from the short poem by Paul Celan,
which reads as follows:

THREADSUNS
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.

This work is in essence a return to that place under the tree where the different voices came together and spoke, and a search to what image would emerge when we consider the shadow to be the work. With my roots in photography where light studies are one of the primary elements to exercise, I walked around with a white panel through the forest to observe the projection of light where it otherwise would not have coalesced. When the sky was not overcast, from an acute angle of afternoon light I captured between the trees, within a small forest, upon her white surface an abstract image of disk-like shadows, shifting and merging, losing and gaining focus. What I witnessed was a phenomenon we all have witnessed, but perhaps not been aware of, not a projection of leaves, but a projection of sun – multiple suns. Because of the distance between the sun, the tree’s foliage and the panel, a pinhole image occurs, creating multiple images of the sun itself, projected into the shadow. As such, the sun, being one of our primal illustrations of the centre – the source – the self, appears in this image as a multiple. This moving image was then filmed and projected close to the window of the gallery, as if it was some incident light from a second sun.”

excerpt from the text Raise | Lower | Inter
written and narrated by Thomas I’Anson and Cathérine Lommée