Like many artists, I made a significant body of work during the COVID lockdowns. In my Geelong studio, I had resources to materialize photography in experimental ways—a practice that crystallized questions I'd been pursuing since Fly Rhythm (2013), a decade-long inquiry into the eternal nature of imagery and its repeatability.
This challenges photography's traditional role as evidence of a singular moment in time, a capture of light frozen forever. But what if light is eternal? What if the play is eternal as long as we are alive and have a body—and perhaps even continues beyond the body's life?
In 1981, I performed in a Las Vegas-style cabaret show in remote Japan—dancing a copy of a copy of a copy of choreography with vaudevillian origins. This experience of performing inherited movement mirrors the way I work with photographic imagery: repeating, reprinting, testing, materializing the same light over and over. Both practices ask: What does it mean when something is endlessly repeatable yet always alive in the moment of performance or witness?
Robert Lanza's biocentrism suggests that reciprocity is always at play when you are alive—that consciousness and the physical world are fundamentally entangled through the act of witnessing. This resonates deeply with my practice. Whether I'm dancing a choreographed sequence or spinning with a pinhole camera at arm's length, there is a reciprocal relationship: my bodily intelligence responding to light, gravity, motion; and those forces responding back, shaping what materializes.
For Fugitive States, I worked intuitively with pinhole photography, spinning with the camera extended at the end of my arm, guessing the exposure time needed as the sun descended at sunset. Later, in Photoshop, I tested these intuitions by using slider settings to see when the image would deteriorate, revealing whether my physical knowing had been accurate.
Fugitive States extends this practice by embracing repetition as method. I print, test, reprint—each iteration asking: can imagery transcend its momentary capture and become something eternal? The cabaret dancer, the photographer, the quantum physicist—all participate in reciprocal witnessing that transforms both seer and seen. As long as we have bodies, this play continues. Light remains eternal.
