Fate

Fate, 2022

Two toned gelatin silver shadowgram films laser engraved with photographic imagery, each enclosed in a Mylar envelope. Unique objects

Since birth is never self-chosen and suffering and death are unavoidable, the biography of all living things is fateful. There are six identifiable creatures in these two images, four visible, two not: the late photographer Masahisa Fukase for whom my re-rendering of his cavorting ravens pays homage, and me, photographer of the reclining woman and the gliding heron. Then there are the (anonymous) twentieth century astro-photographers responsible for the celestial glass plate originals I have reproduced as these films by contact under starlight on the dry salt bed of Lake Tyrrell: one (film B) of the Dumbbell Nebula exposed at Mount Palomar in California and the other (the left) of constellation Carina recorded at the Siding Spring Observatory in NSW. There may be other beings on other worlds somewhere in this pair of heavenward views but they are, as yet, unknown to us. If they exist, fate awaits them too.