REPEAT NIAGARA, 2016 Artist's statement
It’s breath taking. It’s massive, really really fast, exciting so that it raises your heartbeat. Thrilling, heavy, full of energy and terrifying. It’s right there, just over the hip high railings. It has a physical effect on me - I am moved.
I just cannot help but think about jumping in. To think about that death.
I am photographing when a rainbow emerges, I panic a little I want the rainbow and the falls and the feeling. I open the back of the camera for a moment without winding the film back. I quickly snap the door shut again but not before I have accidentally fogged the film.
This single fogged frame has come to represent something about what I felt that day at Niagara Falls. I have used the colour darkroom to manipulate this single frame. Repeating its call, shouting again and again.
In the beginning of the series the image is too light and you can see where the fogging has cropped the image away. It becomes darker and darker and the image flips – so that the only thing you can see is the thing you cannot see in the first image. Through over exposure we see a latent image reveal itself.
Albeit abstract, a new thing is born.