Dear Light, dearest dearest Light - Karien Vandekerkhove

Light doing what light does.
The work of the physicist might be summed up like this: to take the everyday, to make it strange, and then to recover the prosaic from the strangeness. Perhaps not exactly to make it strange, for it's not up to physicists how the world behaves.

To reveal the strandeness, then. What the physicist is asking for is a willingness to accept that there is strangeness in the everyday, rather than complaining "It can't be like that!"

The same might he said for the artist, and this collection of photographs by Karen Vandekerkhove shows why. The images could hardly be more prosaic in one sense. A glass of water on the table. Shadows on the wall.

Retlections in the glass. Light doing what light does: that's all. Offering clues, not all of them reliable.

It's no exaggeration to say that the shadows in Vandekerkhove's images pose questions of the same sort. What is causing them? What do they imply about the world beyond our field

vision? If we turned around, what will we see? They too are hints ol something missing, of the limits of our perception. They are traces made of light and dark, and we are mere spectators.

Extract text by Philip Ball

stock number: NB726