Trace and aura will be an exhibition of photographic prints and a video work, to be held at Spectrum Project Space, Edith Cowan University, 2 Bradford Street Mount Lawley from 23 May to 6 June 2014. The opening is at 6pm, Friday 23 May.

I will be giving an artist’s talk at the gallery on Saturday 31 May.

The Gallery of Impermanent Things is concerned with the temporary, transitory nature of existence. For the exhibition I invited participants to be videoed while speaking to them about the nature of photography and impermanence. The video was projected against a phosphorescent recording surface. As the moving image was being “burned” into the recording surface over several minutes, the portrait is blurred by any motion. The resultant images quickly fade, evoking the transient nature of memory.

The exhibition was held as part of the Proximity Festival at PICA, the Perth Centre for Contemporary Arts in October 2013. The Proximity Festival is a one-on-one performance art festival curated by James Berlyn and Sarah Rowbottam. Over 150 participants took part over the course of the festival. Documentation photographs by Fionn Mulholland

For me the pinhole camera evokes a sense of wonder, that such a simple device can lead to a reproduction of the world seemingly captured in a box. It is a reminder that despite the wonder that accompanied the announcement of the daguerreotype, photography has at its heart some basic natural processes. 

These images were made by placing things inside a large pinhole camera. Where the object blocked the light a shadow or photogram was left on the photograph. So these images are a combination of photogram and pinhole photograph.

Writing about an image of his mother Barthes noted the disturbing nature of the photographic artefact. "Temporal hallucinations" he called them, "like living things that a born sprouting silver grains, they flourish for a moment, then age and eventually die" (Camera Lucida, 1980).

Photographs are impressions of the world. They are marks left behind. Fixed shadows that connect us with the past. They promise to capture the moment and preserve it. Despite our familiarity they can still be the most strange fetishised objects, valued far beyond their frail paper and emulsion fabric.

Photographs seem to promise that that time itself can be controlled, happy moments made eternal. Yet there is no such power, no natural magic. 

These works were exhibited at the Perth Centre for Photography in 2007.

Of all modes of producing photographs the photogram is the one most like the footprint in that it is the recording of an act of physical contact. Photograms are produced by quite a different method to traditional analogue photography. 

The photogram records the action of blocking light. What is attested to is the absence of the thing it depicts, not the thing itself. The photogram records an event, showing that an object, for a time, was in contact with the paper and protected it from the blackening effect of the light. The things recorded by a photogram have lived their way into the image. What is recorded is their act of resistance against the penetration of light.

I love the way that polaroids, at least in their original unscanned forms, have a physical presence in the way that digital photographs or even film images do not. When you are holding a polaroid photograph, that object attests to the fact at some point it was close to the person it shows, physically there where it depicts. To me they have a feeling of honesty or verity about them, and a stronger (though still tenuous) link to what they show.

While to the modern eye photograms are somewhat strange and unworldly some of their earliest uses were for empirical purposes. The cyanotype photogram originated in 1842 with Sir John Herschel, the nineteenth-century polymath who invented the cyanotype process. This method of producing images generates a stable blue and white image and was commonly used for the production of “blueprints” in architectural and engineering firms.

In 1843 botanist Anna Atkins used the method to produce a book of photograms of British algae, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype impressions. This was perhaps the world’s first photographic book and contained over 400 life sized cyanotype images. 

Photograms of books have the wonderful quality of layering and inversion that brings to mind the palimpsest, the medieval overwritten psalter, with its promise of other hidden writings and preserved lost knowledge. They provide a parallel to the workings of the mind and the unconscious in the way that they contain, yet at the same time hide information.

These images are produced by laying pages from books that I owned as a child. The image produced resembles the original page but is masked by the trace of printing on the other side showing through. The words can only be read in places, some are obscured and half are inverted. The text provides disjointed messages that must be decoded.