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This project was originally inspired after reading Speak, memory by Vladimir Nabokov. This novel, part autobiography, part fiction, challenges our understanding of recall. The book is lavish in its literary content. The smallest observations of life are described with so much elegance and detail.

For me, the novel became analogous to the photographic medium, where subjects of life are 
embossed on paper or film in a way that gestures towards an artist's own sensibilities; something unique that cannot be replicated. 

When I read further about Nabokov, I learned that he was fascinated by butterflies and lived with synaesthesia. Nabokov wrote with colour on his mind, each letter manifesting certain colours. The rich palette and texture of his writings reflect many aspects of butterflies. Their use of colour is paradoxical. It is a language they use to disguise and illuminate.

Many similarities between butterflies and film came to mind. The wings of a butterfly do not contain any pigment. The colour of their wings is determined by the architect of their microscopic scales and the way light interacts with these scales.

Photographic practice is also a play with light which can deceive or receive a spectator.
 Imagining Nabovok transfixed by viewing butterfly wings under a microscope brought to mind looking through a focus finder in the darkroom. I thought seeing the grain under this device might be similar to the way Nabovok perceived butterflies in great detail.  

Nabokov freed himself from life's troubles by curiosity and wonder. 

He once wrote, 

"My work enraptures but utterly exhausts me... To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blinding white arena - all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it." 




 

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Stills from I do love, video, 5.33mins, 2020

I do love, video, 5.33mins, 2020

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Stills from Blue, video, 2020

Blue, video, 12.06mins, sound butterflies wings moving, 2020

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