Chemical Wedding – Image, matter and the (un)making of synthetic white
PhD Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Art
2024
In this research project, I rethink image-making by tracing a white substance across realms as varied as chemistry, alchemy, and seminal cinematic white spaces; through Nicole Kidman’s and Angelina Jolie’s so-called “photo flashback” malfunctions, Pierrot clowns, and John Dee’s stolen black Aztec mirror; and into the landscapes of an open-pit mine in western Norway and the proto-modernist, colonial material residues of White City in London. Drawing on this research, I propose the methods of sludging and shifting, alongside the concept of the homeorhetic, as ways of intervening in a visual regime shaped by a white chemical invention – titanium dioxide (TiO₂) – which I argue has dominated the West from the twentieth century to the present. Ultimately, through this case study, the project seeks to reimagine the possibilities of image, matter, and synthetic materials altogether.
The thesis includes discussions of the artworks of Lutz Bacher, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Dora Budor, as well as structural and neo-structural film, Deafman Glance (1981) by Robert Wilson, and Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) by Robert Rauschenberg.
