Incarnatio is painting with light. There is no camera and no lens. In the dark I place things between silver gelatin paper and different sources of light: minerals, fungi, whatever else in the room can catch or bend a beam. I work blind. What the light did on its way to the paper shows only after the last rinse, so each exposure is a test, and most of it is play.
Where a photon reaches the emulsion it frees an electron inside a crystal of silver halide. The electron moves through the lattice only when the crystal around it shifts into exactly the right geometry, and then it turns a silver ion into a single atom of metallic silver. This is the latent image. It cannot be seen and it cannot be undone, and the developer only brings it to the surface. What appears on the paper records the meeting of light and the things it passed through, at the quantum scale.
I named the series Incarnatio because that meeting has the shape of an incarnation. Light has no mass and no fixed position, it exists as a spread of probabilities until the moment it is absorbed, and then it becomes silver and stays. In the double-slit experiment a particle stays a superposition of possible states until it is detected, and detection decides which one becomes real. In the darkroom the paper does the detecting, and the print is what the measurement leaves behind.
The works are titled in the notation of that probability density, |ψ|²-001, |ψ|²-002. The play goes on in the chemistry, with potassium ferricyanide bleaching, the Sabattier effect and mordançage, which interrupt the event after it has happened and leave a second structure in the silver. Shapes like electron orbitals or galaxies come out of chance in the silver, without my hand in them. They resemble the sky because an electron cloud and a cluster of galaxies follow the same laws of density and distribution.
Lectio is Latin for reading. The series began with thin sections of stone, two polarizing filters and a microscope, and with a question I brought with me from geophysics, about the conditions under which matter becomes readable at all.
Between crossed polarizers most matter goes dark. Light comes through only where a crystal treats it unevenly, where the lattice splits one beam into two that travel at different speeds and meet again at the analyzer, where they make the colour in these images. A cubic crystal stays black. Its order is too even to give the light anything to carry.
What the microscope records, then, is the asymmetry inside the mineral, the small departure from perfect sameness that a stone keeps from the moment it formed. It is a record that only light can read. In ordinary light a thin section is a pale, nearly colourless slice of rock. Between the polarizers the same slice shows how the crystal grew and where it was strained, written in colour. The writing was in the stone all along, and it becomes legible only when light of a single direction passes through it. Photographing it is how I read what is written in stone.
These are studies for an installation I call Inhabited Light. A micrograph of a mineral, a few hundred micrometres of crystal seen through the polarizing microscope, is projected at the size of a room, onto the walls and back onto the stone it came from.
At that scale the birefringence and the interference colours stop being something to look at under a lens. They fall across the floor, the furniture and the person standing in the beam, and the inside of the crystal becomes the atmosphere of the room, with nothing added to it beyond the change of scale.
The photographs here come from the first tests at home, with a projector, a wall and the light the projector throws back. They belong to the same question as the darkroom and the microscope, the question of how light, passing through matter, makes the space we live in.