This work renders visible the invisible, creating artworks from ‘thin air’.
On residency in Beijing in 2008, breathing air so polluted that it was often even hazy indoors, I pondered using that thick, very present air as a raw material in my art practice.
Fast forward to 2019/20: the Black Summer bushfires were the imperative to move the project forward, and I’ve since been developing a process-based machine (made largely from recycled materials) that can ‘extract’ an image from the particulates in the air around it.
My screen-based filtration system draws air through fine silk stretched taut across a screen-printed gauze stencil. The stencil mediates the airflow, and the resulting distribution of particulate matter deposited on the silk ‘filter’ creates the image.
I initiated my first successful tests of this system – using stencils created from my own photos of ecologically sensitive sites, and our Sydney air as raw material – in October 2023, installing two machines in my solar-offset studio inside an open, screened window. Checking in February and expecting a ‘Shroud of Turin’-like effect at best, I was very surprised to find that my simple device had extracted much clearer images from ‘thin air’ than I’d thought possible, in just four months. I’ve since continued adjusting the system to accelerate image capture and improve definition.
