Drift.

As your eyes settle on the shadow, as they dilate, you begin to slip. There are no hard edges here. No anchors. Only diffusions. Slow expansions.

Wine.

For a time, people debated whether the ancient Greeks perceived colour in the same way as we do now. Did they see blue? What was a wine-dark sea anyway? But it wasn’t about the red. They were talking about shimmer and flare of light on a shifting surface—the moving, shining spectacle of it all. Holding up a sloshing cup of wine became a hero’s journey through a raging sea. An image. A phrase. An artefact, of a kind, of a culture with different visual priorities and emphasis. Even then, when vision is understood in both cultural and biological terms, you are no closer, not really, to the question you started out with: Do we see the same things?

Wonder.

No, says Robyn Stacey about her new photographs. They’re not of anything. They’re just light. A sly title, when there is nothing more wondrous than light, and nothing more strange. From slot experiments and wave-particle duality, to the apricity of the winter sun warming the skin. None of us understand it, not if we’re honest, but we feel it.

Movement.

We often talk about being drawn into artworks, using the language of bodies and movement. Stacey’s new light photographs suggest a physical space but nothing quite coalesces. There are shadows and gradations, but they’re not negatives as we might expect. There are, as she says, no objects. Instead, there is just the illusion of perspective and depth. These are vivid and luminous works. They offer a meditative space but it is not one that you enter, not with gravity intact. They often feel more like slipping. Like falling into light.

Pinholes.

For some years, Stacey built camera obscuras in hotel rooms and artist’s studios—darkening the windows and letting the world in through a pinprick. They were ephemeral works. As the sun rose and fell outside, a reversed and inverted image appeared inside, and then passed away. At the time, Stacey described these camera obscuras as “in-between spaces” that were in the world but removed from it. They were unsettling mirror worlds—places where the familiar had to be reevaluated.

Drawing with light.

Just light, projected through coloured gels and simple perspex shapes. Light and colour and shadow—the tools of photography. Stacey’s process is analog. Each composition has been arrived at through an intuitive process of adjustment, sometimes over many days. This is similar to her earlier, highly-staged still life photographs of objects from historical collections, which also required moving in increments and responding to what is there. But these new works, she says, are largely irreproducible. Each one is contained. There’s obvious attention to balance and visual pleasure, but the intensity also comes from the way these works open space for association, memory and emotion. They are both otherworldly and allusive. The simple geometric shapes, used to both contain and mask the light, provide structure but some suggest planetary bodies. Others, thresholds. The colours are saturated. One work shifts from a yellow-toned green, bright as a new leaf in the sun, to the kind of tropical aqua found on postcards and paint chips. Just light? Perhaps. Stacey’s intent is not cool or detached. She wants to stir something. Instinctive responses. Feeling. A layering of experience, past and present.

Curtains

Working inside her camera obscuras, watching the world come in as a ray of light, Stacey found herself thinking about light in elemental terms. In Nothing to see here, 2019, she projected film onto sheer, softly draped curtains. She was playing with ideas of concealment and revelation, and the history of the curtain in art and cinema, but the device also became a way for her to explore light and colour without relying on a traditional subject/object. In these works, the curtain was both foreground and background, intermediary and focus. It was another leap in what has been a wide-ranging, four-decade practice. “In a sense, I have just followed photography,” she said once. But it is also possible to see Stacey’s work as an ongoing exploration of perception—how it is shaped, and how that then influences our understanding of our world and ourselves.

Darkness.

Schopenhauer once said that we take the limits of our own field of vision for the limits of the world. Plato had his cave. Darkness has often been used to talk about the unknown and unknowable, but in Just Light it is afforded the same importance as light and colour. One work, The void is a visual place, 2021, centres on a receding, endless blackness, but most place light and dark in balance. The shadows are not voids or gaps, but points of connection—parts of a whole. They are works that insist that light, although it may be what we are first drawn to, cannot exist without darkness. As the poet Mary Oliver put it in The Uses of Sorrow: Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

Kaleidoscopes.

A spin. A clatter. Colours resolve into new formations. In some ways, Just Light offers the same pleasure, the chance to move through sensations and feelings. To enjoy colour. To see the world again in a new light. Or just, to see light.

Jane O'Sullivan
2021