Matthew Hearn

"Milk Apparitions"

Section MS14, Jermaine Francis

Keywords: photography, sculpture

This project is all about milk, or is it? The sculptural triptych is a representation of an action made in the landscape, which involved burying a lead trough filled with milk in the ground. Within each of its three constituent pieces milk is the main subject of the work but its presence is often subverted. In the case of the lead trough on the ground, milk becomes an agent of disguise and misrepresentation as it has become a projection surface for which to represent another material. On the wall mounted lead sheet, liquid light emulsion was used to transpose an aerial image of that same trough of milk buried in the landscape. However, once developed the area where the milk is present, due to its white tone is not printed. The absence of the printed milk at the centre of this image is representative of the void - both in terms of the negative space the milk occupied at the time the photo was taken and in terms of the artists personal connotations and relations with the material.