NIHAL YESIL STUDIO

Leaping Field, 2017
Laser cutting and engraving on perspex

This work forms a part of an existing group of photographic work called Leaping Field (2015). It is defined by my interest in the relationship between materials and the digital world as not only implying a type of seeing that is enabled by machines but also in relation to them.

In Leaping Field (2015), I photographed an error that occurred in a digital camera’s recording of fluorescent light as it bounces around a piece of contoured PVC, producing images of the space between the eye and technology. For this work, I chose to work with laser cutting/engraving to translate these images of nothingness into physical objects in the world. The data from the digital images have been transcribed into perspex, making something out of nothing.

As art historian Jelena Stojković writes about Leaping Field in her text ‘Vision Without the Eye: Following the Material of Abstract Photography’ (2017): pictures of nothing require us to not only look hard at what we see but to also problematise their material basis. ‘Following’ the material in Leaping Field (2015), she writes, suggests that photography does not simply represent materials or is only made of materials but that it also makes with materials, most notably that of light, which offers a sense of what Karen Barad calls the radical openness at the core of all matter.