The Atmosphere of Perception

By Mark Amery

No matter the advances in digital technology, your travel snaps are always going to disappoint. They require your personal animation to convey the perception of what it was like to experience a strange foreign landscape.

Over more than twenty-five years, one of our leading photographic artists Megan Jenkinson has explored through the fine cutting and weaving together of photographic images how she might represent those things that are unsnappable. Tapping into philosophy both ancient and modern, she muses on the mysteries of feeling and sensation, whilst also rather magnificently managing to make us consider our behaviour and place in the wider environment – a combination art has often striven to deliver on.

Her last big public gallery show in Wellington was an impressive series of contemporary representations of the concept of The Virtues (as first developed by the ancient Greeks and Romans) at City Gallery in the mid 1990s. Since she has moved from intricate handcoloured and cut collage to layered, sophisticated digital photography.

Those ‘90s works had all the textual intellectual complexity of postmodern collage, yet also managed to be witty and engaging to boot. The work she has been showing in recent years with Mark Hutchins Gallery is more austere and could be described as postRomantic. It reengages with nature as sublime and surreal – unknowable - a place of meditation for the spirit on the mysteries of perception. While on the visual surface far simpler in approach, her works continue to push into new ground the construction of images as distillations of our complex experiences of the world – not simply replications of nature.

There’s a coolness to Jenkinson’s digital work - the ornate austerity of the church. However rich and fine it doesn’t have the warmth of the handmade or intimacy of the individual mark – it’s as if such works were made for  a place for many of grand contemplation.   

The series Atmospheric Optics, of which there are three major works here, has been inspired by an Antarctic Artist’s Fellowship in 2005. She found that her images of this vast almost alien landscape started to look the same, and didn’t go at all far in expressing the awe-filled beauty and strangeness of this place.

While not experiencing them in the summer months, she became interested in the constantly shifting bands of Auroras that bring intense colour to skies in Antarctica at its darkest. The aurora, a friend tells me who has seen them in Antarctica are the most difficult of natural phenomena to describe or capture. Constantly changing, utterly magical, they are an unworldly abstract atmospheric force in an unworldly place. As such they present a great challenge for art, and rich potential for Jenkinson to reflect on our place in the universe.  

In response Jenkinson has been experimenting with lenticular image process. This sees several images layered into a single print, but with a ridged lens placed onto the surface which reveals and concerns these images as your eye passes across it, so the surface changes (a technique you’re likely be familiar with from fancy 3D postcards).

In Jenkinson’s work the bands of aurora flash and change as you pass the image. Better still you can activate the work by engaging in a dance before it.
 
This all carries an initial suspicion of visual effects wowing you over content. Yet Jenkinson’s use of lenticular technology connects in strongly with her interest  in exploring optical experience and perception as an action. Her refined play with the most exquisite colours (from turquoise  to magenta) and drapery (used to create the aurora) reminds me of the way we evoke the rich complexity of nature through the finest ornamentation. In another recent series for example she created imagined Antarctic jellyfish out of manipulated upside down chandeliers. 

Jenkinson celebrates rather than conceals the fact that you are looking at a construction. Through photography the rocky Antarctic landscape in partial melt has become an exquisite object, the aurora a dazzling veil. This control of the environment and our own ability to change the works with our movement, reminds you of our power to change our atmosphere and the fragility of this melting environment. Jenkinson makes us aware that weather isn’t something that just happens to us, it clothes us like a fabric. 

All of the works in this exhibition are also a beautiful exploration of the abstract and its connection to the spirit. The exhibition notes record Jenkinson’s interest in Goethe’s writing on colour. How Goethe describing its elusiveness and changeability before our eyes called colour ‘acts of light’.

In a new series, The Heavens Opened, the colour and tones of lenticular images of clouds are inspired by the work of great artists. While the content remains disarmingly simple, the works change beautifully in atmosphere in a movement between image and afterimage. Rather than populate clouds with angels, Jenkinson explores new ways to allow us to meditate on the spirits in the sky.

Second Silence, Megan Jenkinson, Mark Hutchins Gallery, until 3 October