Guide Value:

Lot Number: 19

No matter how hard I look, I know what I see and remember may not actually be true. When my eyes explore a scene they move from point to point. I feel confident turning away that I have seen the scene completely, but when I try to visualise the scene my mental image is full of blanks.

‘Normal’ vision does not give us the complete picture that we think it does, but we are unable to ever see a complete picture. Our eyes only focus at the very centre of our vision and as they move through the scene we only read and remember small fragments of important visual information and fill in the rest.

This is not vision but a type of ‘Revision’, something altered, edited, changed and developed in the mind. We see what we sense is there, what we know is there, what we hope is there, not necessarily what actually is.

Continuing on from my other projects that have been inspired by the fallibility of our own vision, ‘Revision’ takes inspiration from the fact that we are unable to view detail without consciously looking.

In researching this visual phenomenom, I discovered that the subject which causes the eye to jump most frequently and erratically between visual reference points is the naked human body. This is because the naked human body is the most emotionally loaded of subject matter. Often, when confronted by a naked body you don’t know where to look, or may even avert your gaze, and thoughts arise such as ‘Am I looking too long?’, ‘Should I look away?’ or ‘Have they noticed me looking?’.

In making the ‘Revision’ series, I photographed the naked body wildly out of focus, resulting in extremely blurred images. The aim is to remove all detail from the subject, leaving just washes of representational colour and the vague visual form of the human body. By doing this, I hope to enable the viewer to see more completely and fully the naked human form, eliminating the detail that usually causes the eye to jump around and allowing them to experience the whole.