Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

Arcana, Judith

99Arcana – Eight – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
Judith ArcAnA
Eight
Awake and asleep or both or between I traveled
in my bed, voyaging grey waves and storm foam
under black skies ripped by fierce winds, or
The bed bobbed and eddied in slow breaking circles
of sunlight on flat green water; or rocked
on smooth blue pools, riding slow swells easily.
And every time, great sharks swam round my bed:
I saw their strict fins, saw they were not orcas
marked like magpies, mimes and clowns. Not dolphins.
I would lie rigid under the sheet: to stay alive
I must not move, not stand up against
the headboard, brace muscles for action,
Raise the sheet into a sail; I must not sit up
when they swim alongside, toothed skin raking
the mattress, gill slashes red above the water line.
From the smallest corners of my eyes I’d see them
thrust their thick torpedo snouts from the water;
they rose with gaping gullets, baring mythic teeth.
But the bed did not grow sodden, capsize, slip
below the surface and slide me paralyzed
under water to the circling sharks’ open throats.
In the darkened theater of childhood, I turned away
from the screen, from the shadow of danger. Closing
my eyes, I learned nothing of death, only of fear.
Judith Arcana’s writing has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Poetica, Triplopia, 
Bridges, Nimrod, NW Women’s Journal and two anthologies: Women’s Lives and Fresh 
Water.  Among her prose books is Grace Paley’s Life Stories: A Literary Biography; and 
her new book is a poetry collection, What if your mother (Chicory Blue Press, 2005). 
A native of the Great Lakes region of the United States, she now lives in the American 
Pacific Northwest.


English

"Eight"

Cooper, Jim

100 Cooper – Sergeant P – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
Jim Cooper, Thank God for William Blake, artist’s page,  2006, mixed media on paper.
101
Jim Cooper
Sergeant p
I am currently engaged with a project entitled Sergeant P, which references the famous album 
cover of the Beatles in 1967. My large-scale ceramic figures play with the various personages 
on that cover. 
The original concept for the cover came from the English pop artist Peter Blake who had asked 
the Beatles who they would have over for dinner if they could invite anybody. Their answer 
led to the inclusion of Alistair Crowley, Mahatma Ghandi, Aubrey Beardsley, Marilyn Monroe 
and Shirley Temple – amongst many other famous people – on the cover. Jesus and Hitler 
were considered by the Beatles, but were excluded in the interest of not offending anybody. 
A pull-out with freebies in the original album included sergeant’s stripes and a moustache 
so that the buyer could dress-up like a Sergeant Pepper himself.
Since 1967, many other versions of the cover have seen the light. A grittier interpretation 
was created by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention; and a Japanese electronic version 
showed the people from behind. The Rolling Stones’ response to it was called Satanic Majesty’s 
Request and featured themselves as wizards in a fantastic, psychedelic landscape with a 
cut-out of the Beatles’ heads paying a tribute to them as rivals.
My ceramic figures build my own version of the cover with eighty personages. I  want them 
to have a ‘knocked-off’ look by making them quickly and without paying attention to detail 
so that they ‘admit’ that they are not the originals. I also want to show them as a large crowd 
in reference to the actual cover; and I planned for them to exude a sense of abandonment, 
as if I were on drugs. The brightly-coloured motley crew thus plays with the rock culture of 
the sixties and brings many associations with the radical left of that time into the frame. My 
writing includes images from the project and combines these with informal text in the manner 
of 1960s William Burroughs’ and Patti Smith’s visual, cut-and-paste style. Again, my work 
refers to the context of the late 60s and its heady sense of experimentation; of all things being 
possible in an era radically critical of conventions and the authority vested in them.
Cooper – Sergeant P – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
ArTiST’S pAGeS
102
Jim Cooper completed an MFA at Otago Polytechnic in 2001 and is currently a lecturer 
in ceramics in the School of Art. He has won major awards for his studio work, for 
example the Norsewear Art Award in 2005; and exhibits widely in New Zealand. 
Sergeant P will commence on an exhibition tour at the Dowse Art Gallery in Lower 
Hutt; a tour to be concluded at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2007-8.
Cooper – Sergeant P – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
Jim Cooper, ceramic figures from Sergeant P, 2006, a studio view, heights variable from approx. 50 
to 120 cm. 


"Sergeant P"

Denison, Jim

Winslade, John

Understanding Problematic Sporting Stories: Narrative Therapy and Applied Sport Psychology

Moorfield, John C

Teaching and Learning an Indigenous Language Through its Narratives: Máori in Aotearoa/New Zealand

McNab, Craig

 117
REVIEWS
Martin Parr & Gerry Badger,
The Photobook: A History
volume 1 
(London: Phaidon, 2004)
By Craig McNab
“Anybody doesn’t like these pitchers don’t 
like potry, see? Anybody don’t like potry go 
home see Television shots of big hatted 
cowboys being tolerated by kind horses.” 
(Jack Kerouac, 1959.)
These words Jack Kerouac wrote for the 
introduction of Robert frank’s The Americans 
(1959) could just as well apply to Martin Parr 
and gerry Badger’s extraordinary publication 
The Photobook: A History volume 1. This work 
is the first of a two part study nominally about 
the vital and enduring photographic form 
of its title, but gesturing beyond to offer a 
fresh approach and alternative conceptual 
positioning of the medium. The authors 
have put together one of the most engaging 
photography histories yet written and volume 
one, reviewed here, in effect traces the 
prehistory, rise and resolution of modernist 
photography.1 In the preface Parr evokes the 
impact of discovering frank’s The Americans 
as a student:
“An inspiring teacher, it opened my eyes to the 
true potential of photography; it […] alerted 
me to the way in which a well-made book 
can bring a group of photographs to life. The 
combination of remarkable images and good 
design in a book that is beautiful to open 
and pleasurable to leaf through is an ideal 
way of conveying a photographer’s ideas and 
statements.” (p.4)
In utilising the paradigm of this exemplary 
work of photographic modernity to inform 
their own history, Parr and Badger produced 
a classic photobook themselves. The layout 
and reproduction standards are exceptional. 
After starting a chapter with an introductory 
outline, each selection (from the over two 
hundred photobooks included) is given a 
succinct written passage detailing its context, 
attributes and significance. Alongside these 
brief critiques are images of the books as 
Image of the cover: The Photobook: A History 
volume 1 by Martin Parr and gerry Badger. 
(London: Phaidon, 004, courtesy of the 
publisher.)
Reviews – Junctures, 6, June 006 
 118
three-dimensional objects showing the 
cover and a number of page spreads. The 
text is always informative with a deft touch 
carefully balancing the scholarly and matter-
of-fact to make an easy but spirited read. 
for instance, the commentary on Diane 
Arbus’s eponymous monograph is typical 
as it captures the work’s essential qualities 
without distortion and avoids the judgemental 
reading of most critics:
“…it is a brilliant exposé of American life 
[…] as cogent and penetrating as that of 
either Walker Evans or Robert frank […] Her 
vision was much more complex than many 
have acknowledged, perhaps perverse but 
never perverted – a beautiful, sad, moving 
testament to the human condition, brilliantly 
edited and sequenced.” (p.58)
Bibliographical details, actual sizes and 
printing notes round out each entry. Due to 
the illustrative methods used the physicality 
of each book is clear and (notwithstanding 
the smallish images) rather surprisingly 
dispels any frustration at not seeing the 
complete thing. 
This first volume is divided into nine chapters 
and only loosely follows a traditional 
historiographic model of photography drawing 
from the medium’s three formative impulses 
– science (epistemology), politics (ethics) and 
art (aesthetics) – to present its subject as a 
linear narrative of progress. That the faintest 
trace of this model is applied to the work as a 
whole and within each group of chapters can 
be seen in their titles: “Topography and Travel, 
The first Photobooks; facing facts, The 
Nineteenth-Century Photobook as Record; 
Photography As Art, The Pictorial Photobook; 
Photo Eye, The Modernist Photobook; A Day 
in the Life, The Documentary Photobook 
in the 1930s; Medium and Message, The 
Photobook as Propaganda; Memory and 
Reconstruction, The Postwar European 
Photobook; The Indecisive Moment, The 
‘Stream-of-Consciousness’ Photobook; 
Provocative Materials for Thought, The 
Postwar Japanese Photobook.” (p.3) However, 
as much (or as little) as Parr and Badger may 
use this conservative account of photographic 
history, their work structurally resists it by 
focusing on the self-contained sequence of 
photographs in the photobook rather than 
the single iconic image. In most undertakings 
the latter is typically used as a sort of unitary 
building block for other ontological regimes, 
semiotically and then formally, its meaning 
being abstracted from its placement. for 
example – semiotically, the single photograph 
is the sign of the referent, say evidence of 
this event or that object; and formally, a 
particular application of the medium, say a 
wedding photograph or artistic landscape. 
That is, we are always made primarily aware 
of its referentiality to the real or to its type, 
(as Roland Barthes states in Camera Lucida: 
“the referent adheres”). And further, from 
this perspective we tend to loose sight of 
the photographer’s presence, as though the 
image somehow came into existence by its 
own accord to function illustratively in the 
context in which it is seen. The sequential 
image in the photobook tends to resist this. 
To be sure there are still varying degrees 
of referentiality but the primary stimulus 
of meaning is the relationship between the 
images, whether in small clusters or over the 
book as a whole. Taken singly out of context 
these photographs are mute. Again Barthes 
(“The Photographic Message”): “Thus can be 
seen the special status of the photographic 
image: it is a message without a code […]” 3 
-- that is, the coding of human intervention. But 
leafing through the pages of a photobook the 
photographer’s intentions become apparent, 
the book is dynamic. In fact photobooks 
signal a phenomenological engagement with 
the work presented, for both their audience 
Reviews – Junctures, 6, June 006 
 119
and producer. The reader ‘uses’ the book as 
an actual physical object and through this 
use gains an understanding of its meaning. 
And on the other hand, the artist creates 
this meaning through the play of the various 
structural elements they introduce to be 
used.4 from the spreads provided by Parr 
and Badger we can see these works are 
never restricted to the sort of narrative 
drive that would make the form a type of 
frozen cinema. Rather, the artists involved 
in the construction of these photobooks are 
typically looking to create a new discursive 
language to explicate the slippage within the 
medium of photography and to the real. And 
in the numerous examples presented they do 
this successfully.
The final chapter, “Provocative Materials for 
Thought”, on the Japanese photobook (the 
highlight of Parr and Badger’s work), offers 
a good example of this process. The authors 
point out that Japan has a rich tradition of 
publishing photobooks over single prints, and 
quote from Koji Taki and Takuma Nakahira 
writing in the manifesto of the radical 1960s 
photo group Provoke:
“‘Photographic images […] often unexpectedly 
provoke language and ideas. Thus the 
photographic language can transcend itself 
and become an idea, resulting in a new 
language and in new meanings’.” (p. 70)
While this notion is an underlying theme 
of The Photobook: A History it can also 
explain how recent Japanese work was able 
to resolve some of the issues of modernist 
photography and answer the excesses of early 
postmodernist work, notably at a point the 
two movements collide – Walter Benjamin’s 
conception of “aura” in relationship to the 
medium. Countering the drive of modernist 
Double page spread (pp. 98-99) from The Photobook: A History volume 1. Daido Moriyama, Sashin yo 
Sayonara (Bye Bye Photography), 197. (Image courtesy of Phaidon.)
Reviews – Junctures, 6, June 006 
 10
photography’s desire for validation as an art-
form producing singular works having auratic 
value, the early postmodernists investigated 
appropriation as being fundamental to 
the condition of photography and thereby 
problematised any idea of an image’s aura.5 
A photographer such as Nobuyoshi Araki 
typically side-steps the whole issue and by 
playing it both ways reduces the question 
to apparent posturing. To date Araki has 
produced over three hundred individual 
photobooks. His earliest work, Zerokkusu 
Shashincho (xeroxed Photo Album), 1970, is 
a series of twenty-five books of eighty copies 
each made up of images that are actually 
photocopies done on the office machine:
“Repetitive, fragile, and now extremely 
valuable, the books […] at once look 
backwards to the origins of the photobook 
and forwards to the digital age, when every 
photographer with a personal computer 
has the capacity to produce photobooks at 
home.” (p. 94)
In producing this work that is both throw-away 
and exclusive the binary is neatly undermined. 
Araki is typical of the Japanese photographers 
we see throughout this final chapter who 
absorb the work of earlier practitioners and 
through a deconstructive process reissue it 
in radically new form.
Arguably the genius of The Photobook: 
A History is that it acts as a sampler or 
compendium for the reader to trace such 
influences, appropriations and reformulations 
from one artist’s work to another. As these 
are all shown graphically through the book’s 
outstanding design one becomes aware 
that although there have certainly been 
moments of rupture (which fit with a linear 
model of visual history - pictorialism to 
modernism; early objective modernism to 
post-war subjective modernism; modernism 
to postmodernism; post-modernism to 
the contemporary situation), photography 
exists on a synchronic plane in a rhizomic 
structure and ultimately as a practice is non-
hierarchical.
1 The Photobook: A History volume 2 is scheduled 
for release in June, 006.
 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida.  (Trans. 
Richard Howard. London: flamingo, 1984), 6.
3 Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message.”, 
1961.  In Image Music Text.  (Trans. Stephen 
Heath. London: flamingo, 1984), 17.
4 An example from Robert frank’s The Americans: 
When Jack Kerouac ends his introduction 
playfully requesting the telephone number of 
the young women pictured in Elevator, Miami 
Beach, he makes an address that apparently 
misunderstands her image’s point (although 
its does suggest the resolve of the referent to 
adhere). frank sequenced from some 0,000 
negatives and so every choice finally made has 
relevant meaning in relation to the others rather 
than directly to the real (which the complete 
work engages with). Considering this particular 
photograph brings to mind employment, money, 
poverty, boredom, pretty girls (of course), 
voyeurism, class, power, to name just a few of 
the (political) connotations that play throughout 
this seminal work. Without even starting a 
formalist enquiry of the image one could run 
the photograph through many more connotative 
frames.
5 The paradox of the medium is that both are 
right and both are wrong. As an example of the 
play of these issues between both schools see 
(two single iconic photographs) – Walker Evans’ 
Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama, 
1936 and Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans, 
1981.
Craig McNab is a candidate in the Master of 
fine Arts Programme at the Otago Polytechnic 
School of Art in Dunedin, Aotearoa/New 
Zealand. He has photographed in the 
“documentary style” for some twenty-five 
years and is currently undertaking a project 
that will involve the development of a number 
of photobooks. 
Reviews – Junctures, 6, June 006 


Review: Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, "The Photobook: A History volume 1" (London: Phaidon, 2004)

Cartwright, Adrian

 22
Adrian Cartwright, 2004-05, Looking South: Aurora Australis, silver gelatin print, approx. 49 x 59 cm.
Cartwright – Personal Geography – Junctures, 5, Dec 2005
 23
ADRIAN CARTWRIGHT
Personal Geography
My current practice as an artist-photographer undertaking a Master of Fine Art project fulfils 
a number of roles for me.  It is a career break from the rigours of secondary school teaching, 
it is an opportunity to indulge many creative whims and fanciful notions, and it is a chance to 
ground my visual imagery in a meaningful theoretical context. More than these things though, 
it is a Big Adventure.  I am thousands of kilometres away from my homeland (England); I am 
at the geographical extremity of New Zealand (Dunedin); I am working in a medium that was 
not my major in my first degree (as I trained as a painter); and during the winter months, the 
climate here can only be described as ‘hostile’.  These factors have necessarily informed my 
production of imagery, as I am currently engaged in pushing myself and my camera to the 
outermost boundaries of these demarcating extremities.  In my dissertation, I have used the 
two paintings mentioned below to discuss my situation; or the scenario of my project.
I photograph at night so that I might find out where I am.  There is an innate beauty and solitude 
in visiting the coastal landscape at night, and on the clear nights I choose to go out, the space 
above my head is filled with many, many stars.  I observe, and am left wondering.  Who am I, 
an artist, to look up and be in awe of what is normally considered the realm of science and 
astronomy?  I see not constellations, but Space, with all its connotations of immensity, of 
time, of portentous energy and information represented as a dense complexity of patterned 
punctuations of light, though barely enough to illuminate my immediate surroundings.
Yet the ‘dome’ of the heavens has been and continues to be contemplated, mapped and 
documented, the act of which is seen in Johannes Vermeer’s The Astronomer (1668, oil on 
board, Musée du Louvre).  In this image we see a scientist, straining forward in a tentative and 
subtle gesture, illuminated by both light and knowledge as he places his hand over the star-
illustrated globe before him.  Vermeer has used light as the key to this image in a sophisticated 
treatment of that which is necessary for both artist and scientist.  By placing his hand thus, 
the astronomer takes a measure of himself against the subject of his contemplation; he sits 
at the very edge of his seat, at the very edge of insight, reaching out to touch the stars.
* Images courtesy of the artist.
Cartwright – Personal Geography – Junctures, 5, Dec 2005
ARTIST’S PAGES 
 24
Vermeer is keenly aware of the realities of the world, the means by which things can be 
depicted, and the nature of inscription as a way of gaining a measure of reality.  But it is 
apparent in this sublime work that he is also aware of the psychological impact of engagement 
in such tasks, for both artist and scientist, and the immeasurable emotional, imaginative and 
mystical response that can occur.  Artists such as I have never shied away from attempting 
to refine and represent in our particular modes of inscription versions of this incarnate 
consciousness.
Adrian Cartwright, 2004-05, Untitled, c-type print, approx. 120 x 120 cm.
Cartwright – Personal Geography – Junctures, 5, Dec 2005
 25
In the face of Isaac Newton’s ordered, rational world, artists such as William Blake defended 
their territory of the poetic and tangential, and nurtured in the Romantic aesthetic a world of 
qualities and sensory experience which permitted varied, personal and intimate responses 
to the scenario of looking up at the night sky.  An “aspiration towards the infinite”1 might even 
permit the observer to leave the numbing drudgery of scientific rationalism for an elevated 
status of transcendental journeying of the mind – to an elsewhere or else when – a memory 
from childhood or geographical location (“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt 
Whitman). After all, most of us can claim at some stage to have been to the seaside, to have 
seen the stars, and to have memories of such times and places.
Adrian Cartwright, 2004-05, Untitled, c-type print, approx. 120 x 120 cm.
Cartwright – Personal Geography – Junctures, 5, Dec 2005
 26
In his image Pegwell Bay, October 5th 1858: A Recollection (1858-1860, Tate Gallery, London) 
the painter William Dyce co-joins notions of scientific, aesthetic and temporal qualities in a 
finely crafted image containing the “terrain of imagination overlaid with those unique contour 
lines of experience”.2
Adrian Cartwright, 2004-05, Untitled, c-type print, approx. 120 x 120 cm.
Cartwright – Personal Geography – Junctures, 5, Dec 2005
 27
The act of contemplation presents us – as with those figures depicted in the image – with a 
cartography of the immediate, the imagined and remembered, the assumed and believed, in 
what phenomenologists would term the key to “lived experience”. The artist depicts himself 
observing Donati’s Comet in the fading light of evening.
Adrian Cartwright, 2004-05, Untitled, c-type print, approx. 120 x 120 cm.
Cartwright – Personal Geography – Junctures, 5, Dec 2005
 28
With the heightened sense of awareness resulting from the occlusion of light, I am mindful 
of the potency of the subject matter I observe.  And the act of looking, wedging my camera 
into a before and after situation,3 impresses upon the film a duration (shown in the length 
of the star trails).  The camera records more than I can see, but as in Dyce’s image, the still 
photographs carry with them an implicit narrative of the topography of an interweaving of 
time, place, memory and experience.
Adrian Cartwright, 2004-05, Untitled, c-type print, approx. 120 x 120 cm.
Cartwright – Personal Geography – Junctures, 5, Dec 2005
 29
 1 Charles Baudelaire in Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience 
Intimate Places (Boston: Beacon, 1994), 183.
 2 Katharine Harmon, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (New 
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 11.
 3 Lawrence McDonald, “How Green was My Narrative”, in Geri Thomas (ed.), Imposing Narratives: 
Beyond  the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (Wellington: Wellington City Art Gallery, 
1989), 69.
Adrian Cartwright is a candidate in the Master of Fine Arts Programme at Otago 
Polytechnic School of Art in Dunedin, New Zealand. He has a background in painting 
and drawing, but is now specialising in night photography.
Adrian Cartwright looking through the Cooke Refractor 25cm 
telescope at Carter Observatory, Wellington.
Cartwright – Personal Geography – Junctures, 5, Dec 2005


Personal Geography

Richard, Constance

 71
CONSTANCE RICHARD
Eucalyptus
Clouds hurry past like people
skirting a graveyard.
Heat infuses the air, simmer of menthol.
Santa Ana winds help undress,
piece by piece, the globulus eucalyptus.
Arms, legs, a face revealed.
Her body thrashes and pulls
in the annual shedding of skin.
Long and narrow leaves, shards
litter the ground, scarves of a dancing woman.
She moves the sky and roots hold her.
Disrobed, she’s porcelain.
She has nowhere to grow but down.
Constance Richard received her Master of Fine Arts Degree
from Emerson College in Boston. Originally from Southern
California, she currently lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Richard – Eucalyptus – Junctures, 4, Jun 2005


"Eucalyptus"

Taylor, Lynn

 73
LYNN TAYLOR
Travelling along an invisible bridge*
* All the images included in this visual essay are details from invisible bridge, the artist-in-residency
project Taylor undertook between Korea and New Zealand during 2003–04, as referenced in the
writing.
An intense red circle.  Glowing through the misty atmosphere between the built up apartment
blocks of Seoul this delicious sight surprises and captivates me.  Confused, I wonder if it is the
sun or the moon? 1   I try to orientate my internal compass by seeking beauty along a dusty bank
on the side of the road, pulling out and collecting weeds as I go.  Sunlight and water draw the
weeds directly onto solar plate2  through the hardening and dissolving qualities of the plate.  My
hands itch and my eyes open, becoming roving microscopes seeing into the secrets of these
cellular bodies.
I can’t sleep because every time I shut my eyes I start drawing with the light behind them, every
possible moment spent drawing with a digital camera, a scanner and Photoshop.  This process
of manipulating imagery through filters echoes my perceptions of immersing myself in a new
culture as pieces of information are magnified, distorted or reduced to textures.  I project my
presence into my absence by tenderly imaging my daughter’s sewing patterns, knowing that is
15th
27th
Taylor – Travelling along an  invisible bridge – Junctures,3, Dec 2004
74
what she is doing back in Dunedin with real bits of fabric.  Shifting meanings flit across me like
in a kaleidoscope. I am displaced, my senses are becoming amplified, what to feel, how to feel?
Over the dragonflies’ hum my ears are searching for familiar voices, yet unsettled by only being
able to shape “you” from a few sounds.  My eyes are hungry, unsatiated by the too few English
words I find nonsensically splattered on clothing.  I push my food around the metal tray with my
chopsticks, wondering if it is a noodle or tiny whitebait.  Neither, I discover.  I sit alone eating
quickly before someone sees me and feels embarrassed for me.  I am watched; I sense the
Taylor – Travelling along an  invisible bridge – Junctures,3, Dec 2004
 75
panoptic gaze and cell phones collectively locating my moves. I think I will be less obvious soon.
I think my face has started to morph.  I think I am starting to look more like the faces around
me.3
Otherwise silent our mutual language is printmaking; we dance in rhythm around the press with
flashes of understanding lighting up our faces.4   My paper, thick, white, acid free, quietly grained
and deckled along the tear, softens hydroscopically with an unquenchable thirst.5   I blot excess
water rivulets before I lay the paper over the inked plate and navigate it through the press belly
on a ship’s wheel.  Tension at the roller indicates in my right trapezoid muscle, and then I fold
back the felts to reveal your hidden secrets.  I peel you off the plate, for now you are my cutis,6
you are my time: my present, past, and future all embedded deeply, drying under my eyes.
My fingertips run across the embossed prints as if I am reading the bumpiness of rice drying on
the highways; the impressions are stamped but not always clear.  Faces of my old friends are
fading; textures are seemingly dissolving into anonymously similar microcosms. I sense a danger
of the prints becoming the same.7   The unpredictability of graphic surprise operates continually;
I am not always getting what I expect but still, unfortunately, discard an image before taking it
through the whole process.  My wondering about what will happen by juxtaposing imagery from
multiple locations and cultures is laced with the saltiness of our shared confusion.  I am numbed
by kimchi burning my lips in my stumbling attempts to speak another tongue.
10th
3rd
18th
Taylor – Travelling along an  invisible bridge – Junctures,3, Dec 2004
76
I pin a wall of prints and lay relief plates across the floor to wrap bodies in the mapping of many
fictions, truths, histories and voices.  Walking along the narrative track of plates I feel self-
conscious, my bare feet cold until the pressure imparted by my foot is answered by the pressure
of the sculptural surface.  Like the pianist’s finger that coaxes sound by lifting the finger off the
key, release shoots lines of light up my legs, awakening my remembering of where I have been
or where I might go.8   My body turns towards the fragile movement of being watched, of breathing,
deniably there but not there, the textured paper pits the crystalline lens of my eyeball.9
My heart quickens. The suitcase shipped from Korea arrives home today, so weathered from
the sea that the contents spill out as if in manic determination to colonise the lounge.  I
complete the unfolding of a disintegrating box to unpack my incised plates and then, spiralling
fluidly backwards and inwards I clone the prints.10   Unlike the disappointment that can go with
collecting a set of newly developed photographs (“I think I remembered everything so differently”)
in printmaking I echo the surfaces inscribed with time and memory, consciously becoming
traces of my journeying.  Longing to be there and here I open up my email address book, press
“send” and interlacing the mercurialism between us, I migrate in electronic space.
26th
20th
Taylor – Travelling along an  invisible bridge – Junctures,3, Dec 2004
 77
1 Appropriately, I travelled to Korea to work with a light-sensitive printmaking process and to print
in the colour of light.  These diary extracts are from some of my writing during my Korean
residency and the exhibitions created from this research, named invisible bridge. Also see
Janine Flynn, “Korea’s Luminous Chosen Colours”, Surface Design Journal: 30-35.
2 A photosensitive resin-based plate used in the printmaking industry, also known as photopolymer
plate and Torelief WS95H11, is available from Toray Industries Inc. Japan.
3 Technology determines that closed human systems no longer exist; we are all members of a
global village. “In the age of electricity, all of humanity becomes our skin.” Marshall McLuhan
at: < http://www.hans-hass.de/Englisch/Energon/6_Appendix_3.html > visited 23/06/04.
4 “Visual culture is new precisely because of its focus on the visual as a place where meanings
are created and contested.  Western culture has consistently privileged the spoken word as the
highest form of intellectual practice and seen visual representations as second-rate illustrations
of ideas.” This cultural shift in favour of visualising our existence “...marks a significant
challenge to the notion of the world as a written text.” Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to
Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000): 6-7.
5 Intaglio paper is soaked prior to printing to open up the fibres, making them more receptive.
6 In the sense of the Latin word cutis: meaning living skin, that protects, that expresses, that
arouses and that registers tactile sensory traces in the manner of  raised scars while operating
like a palimpsest.  I would like to expand this with Steve Connor writing on Michel Serres’s
concept that “...skin is a milieu, an inbetweeness, which requires a physics of the imagination
that lies between the conditions of liquid and solid.” Steve Connor,  A Skin That Walks (London:
Humanities and Arts Research Centre, Royal Holloway University of London, 2002): 8.
7th
Taylor – Travelling along an  invisible bridge – Junctures,3, Dec 2004
78
7 invisible bridge seeks to explore tensions between the influence and confluence of multi-
cultures and in our ability as humans to locate ourselves and foster tolerance.  These questions
have social signification for New Zealand as we are continually working out our own country’s
placement in terms of bicultural status and globalisation.  Cross-cultural harmonies need to be
fostered sensitively because one of the dangers of the Global Village attitude could be that
points of difference, diversity and richness get diluted.
8 “The points on the body once awakened are not merely marks on the surface but are an active
capacity.  Awakening these points as sensate is opening the body to semiosis... to be awake is
to remember, and one remembers through the senses, via substance...memory is stored in
substances that are shared, just as substances are stored in social memory which is sensory.”
My experiences of collective social operations in South Korea led me to notice a lack in my own
culture which I describe through Suzi Gablik’s conclusion that, “... the loss of the communal
dimension in our particular culture has actually truncated our sense of individuality, because
we have such a distorted experience of the world that comes to us exclusively through the
limited ego-self.  We know only about separateness; we know so little about interdependence.”
invisible bridge begins to process the affects of this ‘difference’ for me by diminishing the
subject/object dichotomy that underlies the traditional relationships between artist/artwork
and viewer through being a system of relations. See also: Nadia Seremetakis, The Memory of
Senses: Historical Perception, Commensual Exchange, and Modernity (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1994): 216 and Suzi Gablik, Conversations Before the End of Time  (London & New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1995): 398.
9 By exploring touch as a shared human response and prioritising this rather than sight I aim to
engage the whole body with works and thereby to enhance the experience that you cannot have
a touch experience without being touched back.  Saul Ostrow explains: “The sculptural moment
is not just visual, but also tactile.  But it evokes touch as much as it entails real touching.” See
“Piecing the Pieces together again”, in Nicola Kearton (ed.) Sculpture: Contemporary Form and
Theory (London: Academy, 1997): 18.
10 In the language of traditional printmaking an edition is printed and prints are sold off separately.
If you own one of the prints you have a connection to the other people who own a print from the
same edition, like being part of a family.  Dunedin viewers who select prints from invisible
bridge will be offered the email addresses of the Korean participants and whether or not the
recipients make contact they will still share a bond, and thus an invisible bridge will be created
between the two countries.
Lynn Taylor is a print media artist and lecturer who received her Master of Fine Arts
Degree from Otago Polytechnic School of Art, Dunedin, New Zealand in 2003, the
culmination of research activity engaged with the mapping of memory.  She exhibits
internationally and  her work has received a number of awards and is held in many
private collections.  Solo exhibitions include: re: Kakawai, Dunedin Public Art Gallery
2003 and invisible bridge, Jeonju, Korea, 2003 and Dunedin 2004.
Taylor – Travelling along an  invisible bridge – Junctures,3, Dec 2004


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