Eclipse Towards Infinite Betweens

An eclipse is an interruption of the everyday that occurs when the moon crosses between the earth and the sun, casting them into shade. With the source of the visible veiled, new conditions are set up and other things come into view. Eclipse, then, serves as a metaphor for a different kind of seeing and experiencing.

These photographs are from artist Jon Cottam’s ‘Eclipse Towards Infinite Betweens’ series. Begun in 2010 and completed in 2011, it consists of thirty-six photographs created to explore the relationships between photography, painting, rural landscapes, and the topology of the imagination. Influenced as much by his own collection of paintings, Cottam deconstructs any traditional form and reinvents the landscape with strokes of movement and vivid colour, developing a dense and edgy dialogue between photography and painting.

The photographs are layered with emotional dialects of colour / light / texture. The palette consists of piquant tones; rich yellows compliment deep bronze, while multi-directional brush like strokes enhance the landscape further, serving to transform the familiar African landscape into a place of wonder. Partial strokes appear reclaimed and recovered, their explosive lines of colour and urgent marks spreading over the picture. Yet these works are deceptively peaceful given their unexpected nature of movement. A kind of emphatic reduction of its own subject matter, while at the same time evoking a sense of wonder and awe. Referring to a vision of relativity of all beings and things, the idea that we always occupy an ‘in-between’ state that is never ending and infinite.