Blue Moons shows a planet populated by a solitary, unearthly being. The figure climbs over crystalline outcrops or lurks between granite boulders, with painted skin glowing in the luminous twilight. The alien entity in these images exists beyond constrictive earthling conditioning, inhabiting the space Mark Fisher referred to as 'a sheer alterity, a pure outside.' Making tangible, embodied trips into such transcendental, allegedly ‘unimaginable’ spaces feels equivalent to science-fictioning alternative modes of existing - or field work undertaken in preparation for answering adrienne marie brown’s invitation to 'build a future where the fantastic liberates the mundane.’
Through these photographs I create a portal to a world I am trying to reach, and I climb over that threshold towards experiences I am eager to know. Here, I am able to submerge entirely into a visionary alternate reality - to experience what it feels like to exist in another world. Then, when I return through the portal, I bring part of that experience back with me, a body memory that I can call up when needed; a kind of extra-terrestrial investigation of the platitude 'if you can’t see it, you can’t be it.'
These images depict a sort of celestial edge-land, concerned with linking a mythic, folkloric past to a visionary, sci-fi future. The future part I’ve covered above, but running parallel to that is a tangle of personal connections to a past in a place where I am deeply rooted. Here I connect personal mythology to a broader Celtic one, linking granite and blue painted skin with a resistant, rebellious, deep past and a quasi-druidic connection to the land.
With the Blue Moons series, I switched from photographing my friends to photographing myself. The implicit yet substantial power-imbalances embedded in the photographic gaze (stemming from the camera’s long history as a tool for colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy and capitalist patriarchy) felt really gross and uncomfortable when I was photographing other people, particularly when photographing nudes. The negative implications for bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty didn’t sit right with me ethically. So I flattened out this hierarchy by becoming both photographer and subject/object of the photographs, creating a closed loop of agency, ownership and consent.
Follow this link to read a piece about Blue Moons by art writer, curator and founder of Art Licks, Holly Willats, for Cultivator Cornwall’s Synaesthesia showcase : https://synesthesia.online/Tean-Roberts-1
