LOUISE CW
COATES
STRATUS
'Only clouds exist, though clouds of very different degrees of cloudiness’
– Karl Popper (Of Clouds & Clocks)
‘What is painful may none the less be true.’
– Sigmund Freud
Like the clouds above us, condensation is fragmentary – transient and fragile. Its existence, at the same time as being so wonderfully present, is so devastatingly absent. Within condensation I see reflected much of life: the way that, in nature and in other worldly things, beauty and pathos often converge into one massive swirl of ineffability.
Photography can be seen as one way in which we try to hold on to things, to cease an incessant world. Yet, the beauty of moments like these lies in their transience – in the very fact that they fall swiftly from the present into the ever-distant past.
What does it mean, then, to disrupt this impermanence?
Each photogram in this series is unique, created solely through the contact of condensation on light-sensitive paper. By stripping the medium down to its basic elements – light and time – I explore the tempestuous relationship between photography and its efforts to fix that which is unfixable. Any beauty held within the photograms is tarnished by the fact that they have destroyed that which they have sought to honour. As such they describe a longing – a nostalgia for a past that can never be re-lived, a beauty that can never be contained.
