New Interview now available with Anna Mossman by Ben Gooding:
https://saturationpoint.org.uk/Anna%20Mossman.html
Shivers | Shifts | Overlays Exhibition Review by Claire Scanlon
https://www.closeltd.com/news/13-shifts-shivers-overlays-exhibition-review-by/
Q&A conducted in anticipation of the exhibition ‘Drawing Beyond Itself’, 2020, Air Gallery, Manchester. Questions from Jayson Gylen.
https://www.northwestdrawingcollective.com/post/q-a-anna-mossman
The Drawn and Written Photograph – John Hilliard
There is a history in Anna Mossman’s work of deploying the camera to respond to non-visual stimuli such as smell, sound, or a complete absence of light (more a receptive subject than an impartial instrument, it smells flowers, listens to confessions, or is ‘buried alive’ in the ground). This direction of photography to the seemingly un-photographable has more recently been paralleled by an application of the rules of photography to non-photographic practices (specifically, drawing and writing), in turn subjecting photography to their tactics.
In Lap Drawing (2004), a dot is marked in black ink at the centre of a sheet of white paper. A line is then drawn closely round it, following its circular shape. A second line is drawn around the first, and so on, progressively building into a concentric pattern, the original circle inevitably distorting, the distortion compounded with each successive attempt at replication. Similarly, a drawing commencing with a single vertical line at the left of the paper, or another with a single horizontal line at the top, proceeds to develop imperfectly as a consequence of the hand’s inexact skill in copying.
The completed drawings are photographed onto large-format (10” x 8”) positive film, from which a print is made, now having negative values. This inversion of the photographic norm (i.e. positive to negative, rather than negative to positive) is in tandem with another inversion: the downgrading of the original and the elevation of the copy. The unique, hand-made drawing has become merely a stepping-stone to a photographically reproducible print – now the first-order form of this work. Moreover, given that photography is now revealed as the explicit medium of choice, the time taken to make an image via the extended duration of the drawing process is radically at odds with the convention of the split-second snapshot. Nevertheless, an emphasis of received photographic properties is detectable throughout the production process, including the devices of copying, repetition, and positive/negative transcription. If this sounds dryly self-conscious as a working method, the results belie any such perception. The original dots or lines are transformed into complex patterns that are now loaded with figurative associations, their readings strongly affected by being cast as delicate light traces on an indeterminate dark ground, and the viewer uncertain of their physical status (the hybrid of drawing, photograph and negative giving the appearance of a photogram).
There are, in fact, more austere works, though these may be equally compelling for their close reciprocity between initial concept and finished object. Substituting freehand drawing for the ruled line, and preceding positive with negative, Lined Paper (2006) commenced as an attempt to negatively predict, through white horizontals and a vertical green margin on a black background, the positive image of a conventional grey-lined notepaper page with a pink margin. Again photographed on positive film and printed as a colour negative, the finished size is A4, a close simulacrum of its intended referent, but with the ephemeral flimsiness of paper now displaced by the authoritative and pristine presence of a colour photograph flush-mounted on aluminium.
In addition to these conflations of drawing and photography, there is another body of work which reworks printed text through photographic strategies, utilising especially the reflexive relationship of positive and negative states. In a 2003 series, ZNVIRXZM KHBXSL, based on Brett Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho, Mossman takes a passage, Morning, and rewrites it, inverting words to produce approximately opposing readings. So Morning is now titled Evening, and the original opening sentence, ‘In the early light of a grey dawn this is what the living room looks like: Over the white marble and granite gas-log fireplace hangs an original David Onica’, now reads: ‘In the dusk of an August evening this is what the bedroom of my apartment feels like: Under the black timber and plastic hearth a reproduction Goliath Zerico is hidden’. Mimicking the verbal inversion, a positive original is photographed and printed as a negative, now appropriately saturated with the background blood-orange base of colour negative film. This dystopic version of an already dystopic novel is then re-translated back to ‘positive’, with an inevitable slippage comparable to that occurring through the imperfect copying in her drawings, so that Anna Mossman’s morning and Brett Easton Ellis’s morning just got ‘worse’.
John Hilliard , 2009 ©
(From the exhibition catalogue essay for “Hands On – Photographs by Four British Artists”, curated by the artist and writer John Hilliard, Galerie Raum mit Licht, Vienna, Austria, 2010)
Anna Mossman – Daniel Jewesbury
Photography, as a medium dependent on mechanical and electronic technologies, is often imagined to be an anonymising process. In Anna Mossman’s ‘Lap’ and ‘Lines’ series, the signatory mark of the hand is translated into something automatic; her painstaking, repetitive drawings are photographed and inverted into negative images, in the process taking on new associations far removed from a faltering human hand. Sometimes these seem to be natural (the insistent ineluctability of tree rings), sometimes technological (the mark of a plotting pen on some scientific instrument, perhaps). The drawings themselves begin with a single dot or line, which is translated and repeated again and again, such that small irregularities in the initial mark are amplified and exaggerated, the pattern of repetitions becoming a map of mutations across generations of related, similar, but ever more convoluted marks.
Reversals and negations always imply their ‘original’, sometimes in a causal link (the photographic negative holds within itself the conditions for the existence of a positive, which itself is the record of the ‘world’, as originally transferred to the film) but often in an apparently circular relation – where it’s unclear which gave rise to the other. I’m led by Mossman’s work to a range of considerations of a dialectical or paradoxical nature; and these lead me to wonder how it is that the mark of authorship (of the artist as an individual creator, a ‘genius’) persists in an ‘age of technological reproducibility’? Do these works seek to render uncertain the status of that mark? Or are they in fact seeking to claim for themselves a different kind of distinctiveness, to reassert an originality through technical and formal invention even as they appear to question the ‘mark’ itself as the bearer of authorial significance?
Most obviously, in existing, somehow, both as drawing and photography, Mossman’s works are ‘truly’ neither, and thus they self- consciously render their own categorisation problematic. This ontological ambivalence is not itself so unusual in contemporary art: in painting, the enormously influential ‘sub-
realist’ approach of Luc Tuymans, and the hyperrealism of Gerhard Richter are alike concerned with the same problematisation of representation, with ‘automating’ the painted image, or conversely with ‘individualising’ the photographic image. Thomas Demand is only the most immediate example of those who use photography to trouble ‘reality’ and our understanding of it; but even amongst those photographers who apparently document ‘real’ things, the use of the staged scene (for instance in the work of Gregory Crewdson or Jeff Wall, or even Cindy Sherman) means that the question of what the photograph itself actually is is ever-present. Are these images reconstructions of paintings, or movie stills, or abstractions from other fantastic realities?
What is distinctive, and also unsettling, about Mossman’s ‘Line’ series is their non- representational nature: when we look at the final piece of work, we inevitably read some representational logic into them: “this one looks like…” But as drawings they actually give no reason for these associations – they are simply the accidents of a pre-ordained set of repetitive instructions. They are just lines. As drawings, then, they would have a certain minimalist interest, but as photographs, they have an entirely transformed nature, they are documentary images. Entirely ineffable, inscrutable, non-referential documentary images, but documentary images nonetheless.
Mossman’s series of film images performs a circular motion from photography to painting and back to photography again, with the painted image now rendered as a (pseudo- photographic) negative. The images all show directors and actors discussing the scenes they are engaged in filming, and Mossman selects images from a very particular range of films: Blow-Up and The Passenger by Antonioni, Rosemary’s Baby by Polanski, Don’t Look Now by Nicolas Roeg. This is not simply incidental: even if these just happen to be films that Mossman likes, the selection of these films, and these directors, hints that the images are about more than just the general communicative act in representational art. Here are directors whose own interest is in the
difficulty (or even the impossibility) of communicating, or in the unsettling of commonplace ‘meaning’ as usually constructed in mainstream film.
The brain engages in a great deal of work trying to read a negative image, rendering for itself an approximation of the positive of which it is an index. As we look at the negative, it oscillates back and forth in our mind’s eye between its potential and actual states. Even to an experienced darkroom printer, the examination of a negative is only ever a half- reading; the positive is always an utterly different, sometimes surprising companion. Mossman’s paintings seem to take advantage of this mental approximation, this tendency of ours to complete the picture as we expect it to be; her brushstrokes are often mere suggestions, outlines, hasty areas of shade, and yet we try to make the inverted photographs match as closely as possible the original images from which they are drawn, to make the copy – the copied copy, in fact – a proxy for the original.
An older series of works suggests how cannily Mossman works with these properties of the negative image. The image ‘Lined Paper’ (2006) seems to be at first glance a reproduction of a piece of ordinary A4 from a loose-leaf pad. The viewer then discerns that it is drawn, freehand: so it is a photograph of a photorealist representation, then, of a piece of ordinary A4 from a loose-leaf pad. In fact, the drawing was undertaken in negative, so that the pink margin was drawn in green, and the blue-grey rules in white on a black background. The image only attains its ‘reference’ to the object it supposedly represents through its photographic documentation. If this seems simply to be a clever visual game, we should ponder what it reveals to us about the nature of all photography, which, in attempting to represent the world, can only ever construct a simulacrum of it: a copy of the world that is most convenient to the way in which the photographer (and the viewer) would like to critique it.
Daniel Jewesbury, 2011©
(From Source, The Photographic Review, Winter 2011, issue 69, an essay by the artist and writer Daniel Jewesbury)
On the Blank: Photography and Writing – Susan Morris
Mossman photographs her own drawings that, completed according to a simple set of rules or criteria, often take a considerable length of time to make. Through photography, it could therefore be argued, Mossman makes integral to the work something that might not necessarily need to be there; why not show the drawings themselves (they are certainly beautiful and accomplished enough)?
Instead the work is embedded with the indexical condition of photography. Through the operation of the index, the image points to the drawing from which it was derived. But the drawing is itself indexically linked to the activity or movement that caused it; that brought it, unheralded, into existence. The index operates in the drawing where it traces the response of Mossman’s body to the rules she has proscribed for the work. Then the time spent on the drawing (which can be up to 18 months) and the events that directed or ‘coloured’ the mark-making processes, are swallowed up in the instant of the photograph, which obliterates them – only to put something closer to those original, invisible, events in their place.
So the image is an index of an index. However, as Rosalind Krauss has suggested in her essay Notes… (1986), an index is a sign that bypasses the symbolic system, that remains outside or beyond any system of representation. The photograph contains something unsymbolisable. Agreed, we see a series of marks that make up an image, which (perhaps unsurprisingly) looks like a shroud or a veil, a web or a net (in which things can be caught up, or with which things can be covered over) but through the use of photography something is added and something is taken away – the (unsymbolisable) thing of the image is both doubled and absent.
It is doubled because photography repeats it, while simultaneously pointing to something else that (like an echo) also points to another something that preceded it. It is absent because it contains something connected to the body that is unrepresentable or that exceeds representation; that which is caught in the net or covered by the shroud, perhaps.
As Krauss suggests, photography’s physical genesis ‘seems to short circuit or disallow those processes of schematisation or symbolic intervention’ at work within other kinds of representations, such as paintings or drawings. Through the operation of the index, Krauss argues, physical presence is registered as ‘meaninglessness’ – or nothing. At once a readable image and therefore a part of culture, that which is man-made, the photograph contains something that evades all that: the photograph traps or is imprinted with that which is inhuman. Flickering between the visible and the invisible, the photograph confronts us with that within the image itself that is unsymbolisable or absent; where an unrepresentable reality, beyond words, co-exists alongside that which is recognisable as an image.
In Mossman’s work, photography insists upon itself. Through the operation of the index the image points to that which, inscribed within it, is contingent, subjective and therefore unrepresentable. Without the photograph this point would be lost. Through the addition of the index to the image a kind of erasure occurs; a blind field is created within it. Mossman offers to the visual field that which is unseeable. In this way Mossman traces something (the original movement recorded in the drawing, and the subsequent photograph of this movement) that twice evades symbolisation. By being the index of an index, Mossman’s work pulls the mark back towards nothingness; the presence of the unrepresentable. Despite the rules used to generate the work, what the resulting images veer towards (what they perhaps yearn for) is return to disorder or chaos; to a state before things were named, symbolised. The process of photographing the drawings takes the mark closer to the illegibility and incomprehensibility of the stain.
Finally, by refusing to follow normal photographic procedure and print the image positively, Mossman prints it in negative. In other words, Mossman refuses to attempt to re-instate the original, missing, object that is there in all photography; she refuses to cover up its absence. This is interesting because, while being more ‘true’ to photography, the resulting image – as ‘ghost’ of the missing object – actually looks less like a conventional photograph. It also reminds you that the original object is missing. Mossman’s photographic works do not let you forget what is the case for all photographs: that what you are looking at is not the thing itself.
Once it has been made apparent by the presence of the negative that the original object is not there, then the viewer’s reaction might be to attempt to supply an object to take its place; to imagine what should be there in the space in front of them by thinking of what its opposite might be. But the original object cannot be restored by words because the operation of language, which consists of a chain of endlessly substitutable signifying symbols, cannot supply a single, definitive, answer. All you have when you gaze at Mossman’s work is the endlessly repeatable question: what was – or is – there?
Susan Morris , 2007 ©
(From Extracts from ‘On the Blank: Photography and Writing’ by artist and writer Susan Morris PhD, University of the Arts, London).
https://saturationpoint.org.uk/Anna%20Mossman.html
Shivers | Shifts | Overlays Exhibition Review by Claire Scanlon
https://www.closeltd.com/news/13-shifts-shivers-overlays-exhibition-review-by/
Q&A conducted in anticipation of the exhibition ‘Drawing Beyond Itself’, 2020, Air Gallery, Manchester. Questions from Jayson Gylen.
https://www.northwestdrawingcollective.com/post/q-a-anna-mossman
The Drawn and Written Photograph – John Hilliard
There is a history in Anna Mossman’s work of deploying the camera to respond to non-visual stimuli such as smell, sound, or a complete absence of light (more a receptive subject than an impartial instrument, it smells flowers, listens to confessions, or is ‘buried alive’ in the ground). This direction of photography to the seemingly un-photographable has more recently been paralleled by an application of the rules of photography to non-photographic practices (specifically, drawing and writing), in turn subjecting photography to their tactics.
In Lap Drawing (2004), a dot is marked in black ink at the centre of a sheet of white paper. A line is then drawn closely round it, following its circular shape. A second line is drawn around the first, and so on, progressively building into a concentric pattern, the original circle inevitably distorting, the distortion compounded with each successive attempt at replication. Similarly, a drawing commencing with a single vertical line at the left of the paper, or another with a single horizontal line at the top, proceeds to develop imperfectly as a consequence of the hand’s inexact skill in copying.
The completed drawings are photographed onto large-format (10” x 8”) positive film, from which a print is made, now having negative values. This inversion of the photographic norm (i.e. positive to negative, rather than negative to positive) is in tandem with another inversion: the downgrading of the original and the elevation of the copy. The unique, hand-made drawing has become merely a stepping-stone to a photographically reproducible print – now the first-order form of this work. Moreover, given that photography is now revealed as the explicit medium of choice, the time taken to make an image via the extended duration of the drawing process is radically at odds with the convention of the split-second snapshot. Nevertheless, an emphasis of received photographic properties is detectable throughout the production process, including the devices of copying, repetition, and positive/negative transcription. If this sounds dryly self-conscious as a working method, the results belie any such perception. The original dots or lines are transformed into complex patterns that are now loaded with figurative associations, their readings strongly affected by being cast as delicate light traces on an indeterminate dark ground, and the viewer uncertain of their physical status (the hybrid of drawing, photograph and negative giving the appearance of a photogram).
There are, in fact, more austere works, though these may be equally compelling for their close reciprocity between initial concept and finished object. Substituting freehand drawing for the ruled line, and preceding positive with negative, Lined Paper (2006) commenced as an attempt to negatively predict, through white horizontals and a vertical green margin on a black background, the positive image of a conventional grey-lined notepaper page with a pink margin. Again photographed on positive film and printed as a colour negative, the finished size is A4, a close simulacrum of its intended referent, but with the ephemeral flimsiness of paper now displaced by the authoritative and pristine presence of a colour photograph flush-mounted on aluminium.
In addition to these conflations of drawing and photography, there is another body of work which reworks printed text through photographic strategies, utilising especially the reflexive relationship of positive and negative states. In a 2003 series, ZNVIRXZM KHBXSL, based on Brett Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho, Mossman takes a passage, Morning, and rewrites it, inverting words to produce approximately opposing readings. So Morning is now titled Evening, and the original opening sentence, ‘In the early light of a grey dawn this is what the living room looks like: Over the white marble and granite gas-log fireplace hangs an original David Onica’, now reads: ‘In the dusk of an August evening this is what the bedroom of my apartment feels like: Under the black timber and plastic hearth a reproduction Goliath Zerico is hidden’. Mimicking the verbal inversion, a positive original is photographed and printed as a negative, now appropriately saturated with the background blood-orange base of colour negative film. This dystopic version of an already dystopic novel is then re-translated back to ‘positive’, with an inevitable slippage comparable to that occurring through the imperfect copying in her drawings, so that Anna Mossman’s morning and Brett Easton Ellis’s morning just got ‘worse’.
John Hilliard , 2009 ©
(From the exhibition catalogue essay for “Hands On – Photographs by Four British Artists”, curated by the artist and writer John Hilliard, Galerie Raum mit Licht, Vienna, Austria, 2010)
Anna Mossman – Daniel Jewesbury
Photography, as a medium dependent on mechanical and electronic technologies, is often imagined to be an anonymising process. In Anna Mossman’s ‘Lap’ and ‘Lines’ series, the signatory mark of the hand is translated into something automatic; her painstaking, repetitive drawings are photographed and inverted into negative images, in the process taking on new associations far removed from a faltering human hand. Sometimes these seem to be natural (the insistent ineluctability of tree rings), sometimes technological (the mark of a plotting pen on some scientific instrument, perhaps). The drawings themselves begin with a single dot or line, which is translated and repeated again and again, such that small irregularities in the initial mark are amplified and exaggerated, the pattern of repetitions becoming a map of mutations across generations of related, similar, but ever more convoluted marks.
Reversals and negations always imply their ‘original’, sometimes in a causal link (the photographic negative holds within itself the conditions for the existence of a positive, which itself is the record of the ‘world’, as originally transferred to the film) but often in an apparently circular relation – where it’s unclear which gave rise to the other. I’m led by Mossman’s work to a range of considerations of a dialectical or paradoxical nature; and these lead me to wonder how it is that the mark of authorship (of the artist as an individual creator, a ‘genius’) persists in an ‘age of technological reproducibility’? Do these works seek to render uncertain the status of that mark? Or are they in fact seeking to claim for themselves a different kind of distinctiveness, to reassert an originality through technical and formal invention even as they appear to question the ‘mark’ itself as the bearer of authorial significance?
Most obviously, in existing, somehow, both as drawing and photography, Mossman’s works are ‘truly’ neither, and thus they self- consciously render their own categorisation problematic. This ontological ambivalence is not itself so unusual in contemporary art: in painting, the enormously influential ‘sub-
realist’ approach of Luc Tuymans, and the hyperrealism of Gerhard Richter are alike concerned with the same problematisation of representation, with ‘automating’ the painted image, or conversely with ‘individualising’ the photographic image. Thomas Demand is only the most immediate example of those who use photography to trouble ‘reality’ and our understanding of it; but even amongst those photographers who apparently document ‘real’ things, the use of the staged scene (for instance in the work of Gregory Crewdson or Jeff Wall, or even Cindy Sherman) means that the question of what the photograph itself actually is is ever-present. Are these images reconstructions of paintings, or movie stills, or abstractions from other fantastic realities?
What is distinctive, and also unsettling, about Mossman’s ‘Line’ series is their non- representational nature: when we look at the final piece of work, we inevitably read some representational logic into them: “this one looks like…” But as drawings they actually give no reason for these associations – they are simply the accidents of a pre-ordained set of repetitive instructions. They are just lines. As drawings, then, they would have a certain minimalist interest, but as photographs, they have an entirely transformed nature, they are documentary images. Entirely ineffable, inscrutable, non-referential documentary images, but documentary images nonetheless.
Mossman’s series of film images performs a circular motion from photography to painting and back to photography again, with the painted image now rendered as a (pseudo- photographic) negative. The images all show directors and actors discussing the scenes they are engaged in filming, and Mossman selects images from a very particular range of films: Blow-Up and The Passenger by Antonioni, Rosemary’s Baby by Polanski, Don’t Look Now by Nicolas Roeg. This is not simply incidental: even if these just happen to be films that Mossman likes, the selection of these films, and these directors, hints that the images are about more than just the general communicative act in representational art. Here are directors whose own interest is in the
difficulty (or even the impossibility) of communicating, or in the unsettling of commonplace ‘meaning’ as usually constructed in mainstream film.
The brain engages in a great deal of work trying to read a negative image, rendering for itself an approximation of the positive of which it is an index. As we look at the negative, it oscillates back and forth in our mind’s eye between its potential and actual states. Even to an experienced darkroom printer, the examination of a negative is only ever a half- reading; the positive is always an utterly different, sometimes surprising companion. Mossman’s paintings seem to take advantage of this mental approximation, this tendency of ours to complete the picture as we expect it to be; her brushstrokes are often mere suggestions, outlines, hasty areas of shade, and yet we try to make the inverted photographs match as closely as possible the original images from which they are drawn, to make the copy – the copied copy, in fact – a proxy for the original.
An older series of works suggests how cannily Mossman works with these properties of the negative image. The image ‘Lined Paper’ (2006) seems to be at first glance a reproduction of a piece of ordinary A4 from a loose-leaf pad. The viewer then discerns that it is drawn, freehand: so it is a photograph of a photorealist representation, then, of a piece of ordinary A4 from a loose-leaf pad. In fact, the drawing was undertaken in negative, so that the pink margin was drawn in green, and the blue-grey rules in white on a black background. The image only attains its ‘reference’ to the object it supposedly represents through its photographic documentation. If this seems simply to be a clever visual game, we should ponder what it reveals to us about the nature of all photography, which, in attempting to represent the world, can only ever construct a simulacrum of it: a copy of the world that is most convenient to the way in which the photographer (and the viewer) would like to critique it.
Daniel Jewesbury, 2011©
(From Source, The Photographic Review, Winter 2011, issue 69, an essay by the artist and writer Daniel Jewesbury)
On the Blank: Photography and Writing – Susan Morris
Mossman photographs her own drawings that, completed according to a simple set of rules or criteria, often take a considerable length of time to make. Through photography, it could therefore be argued, Mossman makes integral to the work something that might not necessarily need to be there; why not show the drawings themselves (they are certainly beautiful and accomplished enough)?
Instead the work is embedded with the indexical condition of photography. Through the operation of the index, the image points to the drawing from which it was derived. But the drawing is itself indexically linked to the activity or movement that caused it; that brought it, unheralded, into existence. The index operates in the drawing where it traces the response of Mossman’s body to the rules she has proscribed for the work. Then the time spent on the drawing (which can be up to 18 months) and the events that directed or ‘coloured’ the mark-making processes, are swallowed up in the instant of the photograph, which obliterates them – only to put something closer to those original, invisible, events in their place.
So the image is an index of an index. However, as Rosalind Krauss has suggested in her essay Notes… (1986), an index is a sign that bypasses the symbolic system, that remains outside or beyond any system of representation. The photograph contains something unsymbolisable. Agreed, we see a series of marks that make up an image, which (perhaps unsurprisingly) looks like a shroud or a veil, a web or a net (in which things can be caught up, or with which things can be covered over) but through the use of photography something is added and something is taken away – the (unsymbolisable) thing of the image is both doubled and absent.
It is doubled because photography repeats it, while simultaneously pointing to something else that (like an echo) also points to another something that preceded it. It is absent because it contains something connected to the body that is unrepresentable or that exceeds representation; that which is caught in the net or covered by the shroud, perhaps.
As Krauss suggests, photography’s physical genesis ‘seems to short circuit or disallow those processes of schematisation or symbolic intervention’ at work within other kinds of representations, such as paintings or drawings. Through the operation of the index, Krauss argues, physical presence is registered as ‘meaninglessness’ – or nothing. At once a readable image and therefore a part of culture, that which is man-made, the photograph contains something that evades all that: the photograph traps or is imprinted with that which is inhuman. Flickering between the visible and the invisible, the photograph confronts us with that within the image itself that is unsymbolisable or absent; where an unrepresentable reality, beyond words, co-exists alongside that which is recognisable as an image.
In Mossman’s work, photography insists upon itself. Through the operation of the index the image points to that which, inscribed within it, is contingent, subjective and therefore unrepresentable. Without the photograph this point would be lost. Through the addition of the index to the image a kind of erasure occurs; a blind field is created within it. Mossman offers to the visual field that which is unseeable. In this way Mossman traces something (the original movement recorded in the drawing, and the subsequent photograph of this movement) that twice evades symbolisation. By being the index of an index, Mossman’s work pulls the mark back towards nothingness; the presence of the unrepresentable. Despite the rules used to generate the work, what the resulting images veer towards (what they perhaps yearn for) is return to disorder or chaos; to a state before things were named, symbolised. The process of photographing the drawings takes the mark closer to the illegibility and incomprehensibility of the stain.
Finally, by refusing to follow normal photographic procedure and print the image positively, Mossman prints it in negative. In other words, Mossman refuses to attempt to re-instate the original, missing, object that is there in all photography; she refuses to cover up its absence. This is interesting because, while being more ‘true’ to photography, the resulting image – as ‘ghost’ of the missing object – actually looks less like a conventional photograph. It also reminds you that the original object is missing. Mossman’s photographic works do not let you forget what is the case for all photographs: that what you are looking at is not the thing itself.
Once it has been made apparent by the presence of the negative that the original object is not there, then the viewer’s reaction might be to attempt to supply an object to take its place; to imagine what should be there in the space in front of them by thinking of what its opposite might be. But the original object cannot be restored by words because the operation of language, which consists of a chain of endlessly substitutable signifying symbols, cannot supply a single, definitive, answer. All you have when you gaze at Mossman’s work is the endlessly repeatable question: what was – or is – there?
Susan Morris , 2007 ©
(From Extracts from ‘On the Blank: Photography and Writing’ by artist and writer Susan Morris PhD, University of the Arts, London).