The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
The real measure of a poetic image is in its reverberations. – Gaston Bachelard[1]
Bachelard evokes a wave-like image to define the poetic–and he assigns this reverberation a sonorous quality. Such a description allows for the consideration of time, space and movement in the contemplation of certain types of images. But it also suggests that the first point of perception is a bodily one. Sonority is a quality heard and felt, it is a vibratory response that arises first from the senses before being intellectualised. Poetic reverberations might be experienced as small, imperceptible ripples of sensation or as a full-bodied upsurgeance–a wave of feeling. Whether it is an undulation of pleasure or the vertiginous lilt of confusion, such a resonance will necessarily be subjective.
What strikes me when viewing Danielle Thompson's photographic work, Tears of Ecstasy, a series of Type C photographs of the sea, land, sky and the surrounding elements, is this relationship between perception and subjectivity. Thompson's work, which moves from realist depiction to abstraction seems to provoke a contemplation of self. Descriptions of the exhibition refer to the 'sublime' to suggest the mode of transcendence that might be experienced during the act of contemplation. Another less ethereal way of accounting for this is the difficulty in rendering these images in words–the watery vistas are not overtly placed in a social or political landscape, they contain no figures beyond the often hallucinatory forms of rocks or curves of land through fog and haze. Perhaps it is simply the sheer volume of water that prevents a kind of grounded response to the work–it seems to require an associative technique, description by metaphor rather than literal engagement. For me