Garden (afterimage)
2022
![]()
Garden (afterimage), 2022, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, diptych, 155 x 250 cm
A garden is a borderland between order characterising the conquered space and chaos beyond man’s control. It is simultaneously a symbol of nature’s perfection and our absolute power over the nonhuman. The diptych shows a garden “abandoned” several decades ago, which plants, having escaped control, cover with their characteristic rhizomatic expansive structure. The work was inspired by the rhizome metaphor introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It is a fundamental metaphor of centreless thinking, whereby human thinking is a part of the world’s proliferating, heterogeneous functioning, in which processes have neither starting points nor beginnings, and they also lack teleology. Furthermore, they do not mirror reality, but rather constitute it.
The word ‘afterimage’ in the title refers to the optical illusion that appears in one's vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased. An afterimage is typically a negative image, in which the colors appear inverted from their original state. Afterimages are often caused by the over-stimulation of certain photoreceptor cells in the eye, resulting in a chemical change in the retinal cells.
A garden is a borderland between order characterising the conquered space and chaos beyond man’s control. It is simultaneously a symbol of nature’s perfection and our absolute power over the nonhuman. The diptych shows a garden “abandoned” several decades ago, which plants, having escaped control, cover with their characteristic rhizomatic expansive structure. The work was inspired by the rhizome metaphor introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It is a fundamental metaphor of centreless thinking, whereby human thinking is a part of the world’s proliferating, heterogeneous functioning, in which processes have neither starting points nor beginnings, and they also lack teleology. Furthermore, they do not mirror reality, but rather constitute it.
The word ‘afterimage’ in the title refers to the optical illusion that appears in one's vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased. An afterimage is typically a negative image, in which the colors appear inverted from their original state. Afterimages are often caused by the over-stimulation of certain photoreceptor cells in the eye, resulting in a chemical change in the retinal cells.
