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Nanotactility Series - Wax Formation
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The theme of this series is tangibility/intangibility. Although the nanoscale is a part of everything around us, it is almost always portrayed as a space that is intangible, due to the fact that our senses are inadequate to perceive the goings-on at that level of life. At the same time, new forms of microscopy are rendering images from this space that feature objects and textures that evoke the desire for touch.
With ‘Nanotactility’ therefore I tried to engage with this space in a tactile way, recreating the seed images at ‘our scale’ with materials I thought they resembled – materials that are at once tangible, but also of such a fragile, mutable nature that they cannot be touched without being altered in their shape (ash, ice, and thin warm wax). The macroscale reconstructions of the images were then captured by digital and non-digital camera and superimposed over the nanoscale images, to symbolise that one ‘scale’ is inherent in the other.
The merging is not complete, however, so that elements of each image are visible. Although the different scales really are one, they are not generally perceived to be so, but if we look around us, we can perceive effects that occur on the basis of changes on the nano or micro scale, such as mutations or the properties of ‘nano’ products. Similarly, the activity at that scale is invisible to us. I view the seed images not as representations of matter as it ‘really is’, but as momentary maps of the busy creation of and by matter, and through my capturing of temporary ‘macro’ landscapes and their reworking and recombining with the seed ‘maps’ I am trying to amplify this process.
The resulting images are also highly texturised. You can imagine them being made of ‘real’ materials, you can imagine touching them. They resemble a cover of barnacles, moss, wet leaves or shards, but they also have an inviting ‘alienness’ about them that appeals to our (sensual) curiosity and imagination.
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