The Chemical Moon

This work explores the state of creativity we experience in the gap between wakefulness and sleep, when we imagine the unimaginable in what's called the Hypnogogian state. I like playing with concepts of scale and a sense of memory analogous to peripheral vision, worlds caught out of the corner of our eye, worlds that suggest vastness that are actually constructed from the most modest of materials. 

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I build small dioramas (40cm across) out of styrene foam, wood and paper and photograph them with an old plastic Diana camera lens that has been taped to a digital back. I am very influenced by the way the movies had to build small-scale sets to mimic immensity before the digital age and the suspension of disbelief that this required from the audiences of the time. We now have CGI that makes everything look like a video game and yet still requires another type of suspension of disbelief.

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I'm interested in, to paraphrase poet Shamus Heany "the arc between language and sensation", the memory or trace of it, of places or events, intermeshed with the somewhat fluid state of flux that both photography and memory share with the concept of "truth".

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Mark Kimber, 2013