Home Science – Transforming Light

Responding to coastal environments of Aotearoa, Home Science plays with water and light to affect altered states in images of a universal dynamic and using geometries of organic origin. Ideas of growths’ transformative life cycle are captured as stills in camera-less photographs achieved by analogue experiments in the darkroom and digital applications.

Moving image informs by a more visceral bodily experience of aqueous light, the artmaking process. The notion of Tirtha comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “crossing place” or threshold, representing a transitional journey towards self-realisation and bliss, here in the abstracted forms of constant change. Water landscapes (seashore, rivers or ponds) reflect human states of mind (truth, forgiveness) in modulated light effects that transcend the material. A ritual performance simulates spiritual energy or flow, producing visual and audio acoustics that resonate within a common place bathroom setting.

These works are part of a larger installation, Home Science which reads as an entire gestation cycle, its sum of parts equal to the whole.

Andrea Selwood, December 2020