Duality of Light

There are still moments of transfiguration that come wholly unlooked for, as puncturing instants of experience. An alteration that comes when our souls are jostled and settle back shifted. Such moments are to be found in Lynette Wallworth’s immersive installations, instants of shift that slip in under the guise of wonder, of grief, in intimate connection with another. Wallworth works in intangibles, her projections and installations composed of aetheric light and sound they are inherently changeable, fleeting even and yet these constructions of light and dark offer entry into spaces of intense sensation and perception.

Her work has often been commissioned for specific events and generally seen singly and so this substantial showing at the Samstag offers an unprecedented navigation through her work and one where its overarching lines can be traced out. Entering Duality of Light is akin to entering a low level force field with shut off dark spaces, rooms requiring permission to enter and video screens against the walls of the dimmed gallery like magnetic portals. A tamped down energy suffuses the space and there is a sense of dynamic systems and fluid energies, like idle machines waiting to be activated. An architecture of fields and zones is sketched out and it becomes apparent that what has been made here is a temple complex of a kind, an integrated environment devoted to sensation, experience and reflection.

This feeling that what we are dealing with here is flows and forces is evident in the slow rhythms of Damavand Mountain with its three screens that throw out a hypnotic energy as they cycle slowly through scenes of clouds moving across the mountain face, the budding and flowering of a scarlet poppy and a woman, the wind constantly reshaping her chador as she moves closer to the camera and the observer. These multiple times, the stillness of the mountain, the ethereality of the poppy and the woman, interweave with a slow musicality, each leaving a shadow of itself as it fades. The images meld and move, the freeze fade technique lending each a sculptural weight and what emerges is a sense of place and endurance, difference and unity that persists as sense memory.

As the multiple times of Damavand Mountain deepen its pull, it is the elongated time of Beautiful Sunset hovering on the edge of perceptibility that draws us in and lets us fall into a contemplative state, for light, time and perception are the manipulable stuff of her work. Light is lens, medium and metaphor, seeming to flow through different states as it illumes, shatters and moves, its mutability bringing into sharp focus perception’s unreliability. Other dualities run alongside this inherent duality of light; self and other, nature and world, what we think we know and what is. These oppositions are what she aims to puncture, to dissolve and collapse. Media and matter are inseparable in this other enquiry into the nature of perception and it is precisely at that fluid and changeable space at the interface of perception and experience in which she works.

These works are in themselves entire systems of forces and energies and remembering that comprehend means to integrate, to grasp and include, these orchestrated forces are finely balanced systems for discovery, almost machines for knowing. Here, comprehension comes as a two step. The puncturing moment (of beauty, revelation, connection) and the moment after, where we come into possession of the idea as sensation, perception and reflection are integrated, where we just get it. Immersed in the system we can sense how it moves and balances.

In this, her work fits very precisely with Ross Gibson’s idea of a changescape, that there are “aesthetic systems that are built purposefully to intensify our experience and enhance our understanding of the complex dynamics that are at play when our natural, social and psychological domains commingle and alter each other in this world so full of mutability” . In short, a changescape is an aesthetic system that lets us feel and think our way through the world’s complexity. For this is what her work does, it distils larger systems, of human relations, of ecosystems, of self and other, of time and perception and leads us into live spaces of intimate encounter with them. But her work is never concerned solely with structures or analysis, it is impelled and characterised by a profound humanity, compassion and generosity that is concerned with not just what it is to be human but how best to be human. It is always sensuous and beautiful for it is beauty and grief and empathy that cuts to the quick and enables us to be immersed and that moment of puncture that allows the second step.