Make Good - A Staff Exhibition

In Make Good, an exhibition in the studio gallery at Leeds Arts University, I exhibited work from An Inventory of Shimmers. This  work explores affective space. Described by Gregg & Siegworth (2010) as arising ‘in the midst of in-between-ness’, understandings of affect variously move beyond known and marked emotions, entering difficult to describe, atmospheric bodies of feeling. Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant explore everyday affect ‘as something both animated and inhabitable’, that is, it both occupies and gives life to, whilst containing life itself. Stewart (2007) describes Ordinary Affects as working ‘not through “meanings” per se, but rather through bodies, dreams, dramas and social worlding of all kinds.’ The significance of affects, for Stewart, lie ‘in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible.’

Thinking with affect as interactive, emergent, social and situational, draws me to examine the immaterial, as well as the material, dimensions of my theoretical and photographic practices as they intertwine to make new atmospheric spaces possible. This particular curation of the work marks the emergence of an in-between-ness wherein my ongoing interest in these non-representational and affective qualities of the photographic form, coincide with a decolonial, methodological turn in my research that utilises the fold as a mode for problematising the often-prioritised, flat, fixed, surface value of the representational photographic image. The fold is a practical technique then, which is an experimental model for decolonising the photographic document, as well as singular ways of seeing and knowing.

Visually, the project explores ordinary worlds: the surfaces of paintings, floors, lightbulbs, sweet wrappers, vases, caravans, bedding, dust. Through their photographic, conceptual and curatorial manipulation, the images become a study of affective space, a collection of virtual moments, movements and memories. I cut, fold, move and unfix images, I make images of images, I develop ways to think otherwise about the possibility of the photograph. Simultaneously, An Inventory of Shimmers is generative and destructive; shifting, moving, unflattening and complicating how we might know minute and personal social worlds as well as the ways in which photography can represent them.

1.     Gregg,M and Seigworth, G. (2010) The Affect Theory Reader. DUKE.

2.     Berlant,L. and Stewart, K. (2019). The Hundreds. Duke University Press.

3.     Stewart,K. (2007) Ordinary Affects. DUKE