Altered States

‘In Absentia’ and ‘Altered States’ are approaches to visualising elimination, loss and absence in photography without depicting their emotional impact on the living. These two categories are reflections informed by the empty moulds created from the victims of the pyroclastic blast that hit Pompeii. They left behind the solidified enveloping debris from which hollow casts of their traces were made nearly two millennia later that emphasise their absence. The outline depressions carved and chiselled into tombstones on church floors are all that remains after the engraved brasses that occupied them, depicting the deceased, were prised out, taken away and melted down. The resulting photographs are placed either independently, side by side or overlapping within these two collections. The aim is to explore the possibilities of depicting the unseen.