MANIFESTATIONS
PHOTOGRAPHIC DIPTYCHES, 2013
JANE PROPHET (UK)
Jane responded to letters she had received from her stalker. Five years after the court case that temporarily imprisoned the man stalking her, she re-read the letters he sent to her. These were sometimes lengthy and contained rich descriptive passages about objects, people and places. She read one or two each day when she arrived at her studio. She could not easily separate the object (letter) from her embodied experience of it (nausea, adrenalin, stress) and its distributed environment (fear of death; the bureaucracy of crime).
She began to notice different words and phrases as she became less focused on obvious threats and bloody descriptions. She was drawn to a previously hidden narrative, his writing was populated by repeated references to objects and characters that seemed to be of value to him, and to have a meaning that she could not easily discern. She typed these words and phrases into search engines to see what images came up. She wanted to associatively connect the words to images, to try and understand his world. She used the letters as a model of the inner world of someone with psychosis, and the written descriptions as representations, or models, of his world-view.
When she made the photographic works she made a second panel to reveal the process of making. She saved the search results and she scanned photocopies of the police evidence like the photographs sent to her of abandoned caravan sites. She also etched some of the phrases from the letters into the glazing and filled them with gold. She wanted to value the phrases and to preserve them.
BIO:
Jane Prophet is a British artist who works across media and disciplines to produce objects and installations, frequently combining traditional and computational media. She often collaborates with life scientists: stem cell researchers, mathematicians and heart surgeons to radically re-envisage the human body. Prophet also makes works that analyse our experience of contemporary landscapes, such as the animation Decoy (2001) and the photographic work The Landscape Room (2001) that combine images of real and algorithmic landscapes. Her ten year interest in 3D printing began with Model Landscapes (2005) that includes miniature trees 3D-printed from mathematical data. She spent 2015 working with neuroscientists making work about art, meditation and death.