Borderlands

Borderlands, exhibited at Plaxall Gallery as part of the Edge of Light exhibition, explores the boundaries of sensory systems- human touch, my soft skin, juxtaposed with the alien rigid exoskeleton of the insect eye. The compound eyes of insects are my inspiration for the laser cut Fresnel lenses hung in layer after layer, each new layer distorting and magnifying the last. I do not show the whole eye, but rather eye fragments, each of which display the characteristic hexagonal facets of insect eyes. Peeking out from behind these laser cut lenses is a video exploring the landscape of my own skin under a scanning electron microscope. The skin is projected onto a larger Fresnel lens, which forms a focal point above the viewer. Visually this presents itself as a radially symmetric sunburst of varied light. While some traces of the original projected image remain, only by putting an additional lens in the path of this focal point can the original image be reconstructed, however I do not do this. By magnifying skin my intent is to ‘shrink’ the viewer down to the scale of sensory receptors and create a greater awareness of mundane processes. My skin is my boundary, and through light and distortion I am blending these images with the nonhuman insect eye. The skin is barely recognizable in the resulting kaleidoscopic display, but the movement and fluctuations of light remain, briefly appearing across the surface of the hanging lenses before dissolving again into colored light and abstraction.