Radiation (2019 — Lisbon, metal sculpture of projector and clear film (Thirdbase Residency)

Radiation began in destruction. Working to accelerate the ageing of celluloid — with light from an 8mm re-built projector — I put a fragment of ruined film under a microscope and found, in the damage, an entire universe: fissures, membranes, constellations, forms at once biological and cosmic. The catastrophe had produced an image no camera could have taken.

From this I built a body of prints and projections in which an invisible force acts directly on sensitive matter and leaves its own record. What returns, and what still holds the series for me, is the collapse of scale: the same mark can be a cell, a nebula, a wound, a coastline; the surface withholds every clue and the eye supplies what it needs. I think of these less as photographs than as fossils of an event — light and time pressed into a material. It is here, too, that a longer thread begins: light not as something that illuminates a subject, but as an active matter that transforms another — which I am still following, toward a light that might one day be produced by the living rather than wrung from it by force.