Artist Statement
Within Silence
Capturing the Unseen
Many nuances in these images were not perceptible to the human eye before they appeared in the photograph. Such is the nature of light.
In these portraits I am not concerned with the personality or even the physical body in the traditional sense of portraiture, preferring to focus on the essence of the human being, the soul, and our subtle (light) bodies. These include the etheric life force, which energizes and vivifies the dense physical body—giving it warmth, motion and sensitivity—as well as the astral and mental bodies. The later of which vibrate at different rates or frequencies and interpenetrate the physical body. It is with these energies, thoughts, vibrations and frequencies that I work.
The process becomes an interior dialog. It is therefore equally important what the subject and the photographer are thinking when the image is recorded. Energy follows thought, and as thought changes, so do facial and body expressions. I use translucent veils or scrims to mask the personality, the outer form, in order to catch the light, to better reveal that which lies within.
These images portray that very still and quiet time when we drift neither asleep, nor awake; between life and death of the physical form; and when we penetrate deeper states of consciousness, as in meditation.
All of the photographs are unique single-exposures, which originate from a 4“ x 5“ Polaroid. They are Archival Digital Pigment Prints printed in small editions of eleven using the highest quality inks and paper.
Iris Spellings
December 2007
I r i s S p e l l i n g s
Three Twenty-One Dean Street Brooklyn, New York 11217 718-875-8251 iris@irisspellings.com
Iris Spellings, an Ohio native, earned her BFA in 1975 at the John Herron School of Art, Indianapolis and majored in painting and sculpture. Her work has been exhibited in North America, Europe and Japan and is in numerous public and private collections, including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, the Helmut Gernsheim Collection and the Graham Nash Collection.
After early experiments in various aspects of photographic media, Spellings began in the 1980’s to develop her own distinctive approach to photography. The result was the creation of an uncommonly haunting visionary quality in her prints—a strange synthesis of a reality hidden or unseen, and one being revealed or seen. Spellings seeks a resolution between the creative process of photography itself and it’s potential for a camera image to not only record the tangible world, but also lead you into the realm of dreams and visions.
The Spellings portrait is never an attempt to express likeness or personality. Instead, the use of a live model, actual objects, as well as transparent and translucent fabric scrims, creates a still life. Spellings then meticulously manipulates the real and artificial light that transforms her environment. Moreover, her creative process recognizes the transformational advantages of chance or accident in the development of form…Spellings’ use of divine intervention. Through these procedures her print records that dialectic between a photographic process and its final emergence as a print. One might say that a Spellings print becomes a photographic “mandala” mirroring her creative process.
In Spellings most recent work she continues to experiment with a more intense use of color within a subtle cubist planar space. Her attention is always focused on furthering the understanding the unseen; how the hidden is revealed; how illusion veils reality; and, perhaps most importantly, the universal significance of Light!