This was a collaboration with the Mildura-born artist Filomena Coppola whose work has explored feminine power, Italian migration to Australia, duality, hybridity, sensuality, sexuality and identity, amongst other fascinating topics. The process of this project is clearly explained in Filomena’s essay below.
Penumbra < paene, pene Latin ‘almost’
+ umbra Latin ‘shadow’
Penumbra is a drawing collaboration between Donata Carrazza and myself. I asked Donata to intuitively photograph images of light and shadow. In capturing the impression of an object as it moves across a neighbouring surface there is an intensity and fragility that is retained in the image. This moment allows a glimpse into the passage of time; here light turns into shadow and its depths are revealed by light. During this intuitive process a new journey begins; the gradual release of composition and structure. Through this comes acceptance of shadow, the capture of the unknown and the presentation of a new form that references its former structural self.
The instant I receive these shadow photographs from Donata is the moment of the eclipse – the moment of a mutual trust in which we each negate our individual experience, allowing the collaboration to become. During the transition from photograph to drawing a new story is being woven; this is the story of how I firstly perceive my collaborator through the shadow images and then of how I interpret them as drawing.
The drawing manifests this collaboration and the penumbra caused by the eclipse contains the drawing’s creative centre. The drawing cannot come into being without this generative connection between artist and collaborator; in this case the drawing manifests various experiences – the connection linking the collaborators, the journey created through the artwork and an insight into its process.
One hopes that through the eclipse linking artwork and viewer a new penumbral experience might be created.
Filomena Coppola
For those of us who care to delve, there’s something in-between right and wrong, black and white, yes and no: it’s that which cannot be explained easily, that which requires you to sit in the half-light, without distraction, to remember who you are.
Donata Carrazza
... 