Mari Howells

In the accompanying body of work, ‘Oh, to See Without Eyes’, I engaged with Italo Calvino’s text Six Memos for the Next Millennium exploring qualities inherent in visibility, quickness, lightness, exactitude, and multiplicity. The memos allowed me to map out a constellation of investigations and themes in which the nature of photography as well as its structural behaviors emerged. In 'Lightness', Calvino grapples with the question: How to make art out of a chaotic and unanchored time? This question has felt particularly salient during this period, and I found a quiet grace in the camera’s facility to allow me to make sense of the world. Calvino talks about Perseus, who ‘supports himself on the very lightest of things, on the winds and the clouds’, refusing to look directly, but rather ‘fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed by indirect vision, an image caught in the mirror’.1 

Calvino suggests that in order to appreciate the complexities of a world filled with chaos, we must play out our investigations on a multiplistic field where various systems and influences interact and overlap, expressing the multifaceted nature of reality, and where chaos is not perceived as distressing but as a natural occurrence. In keeping with Calvino’s memo, I explored different regimes of image production—from digital to analogue, the recorded and camera-less. Moving between different genres, materials and ways of working to keep shifting the trajectory of the work and allow for multiple perspectives. In a world currently asking us how we might touch and situate ourselves differently, and with the immaterial effects of our daily screen consumption, my process became a meditation on a more haptic visuality. A photograph of a woman’s back translated into drawings. On occasions paint found its way on the photographs, invoking touch as a gestural intervention. Varied formal languages overlapped. I composed a cello piece and translated my numerical findings of the spaces in between the notes into scanned images, moving photographs across the flat glass of the scanner in accordance to the music notated. The music, cyclical in structure, formed secondary undertones, establishing an analogy with themes reverberating in the work while finding an invisible trace in the images. Information was disassembled and then put back together again in new configurations in an ongoing process of composition and decomposition, in which the photographic medium and my research practice was deconstructed. 

1. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2016), p4.