Synapse Festival | Artists

No matter how hard you look, often what you see and remember may not in fact be true.

The main theme that runs throughout my practice is the fallibility of human vision. My work explores the gaps and holes in vision to make us question our visual experience of the world. ‘Normal’ vision does not give us the complete picture that we think it does, for such a thing is impossible. Our eyes only focus at the very centre of our vision and as they jump uncontrollably throughout the visual scene, we only read and remember small fragments of important visual information, filling in the rest with our imagination.

In earlier work I used environmental conditions, such as heavy fog or darkness, to minimize a landscape in order to limit the viewer’s ability to read what is there, therefore allowing the viewer to visually take away and remember a more visually complete scene.

Recent work has developed the idea of the fallibility of vision further, by taking inspiration from the fact that we are unable to view detail without consciously looking. As we spend most of our time unconsciously looking, we view most of the world as nothing but representational blurred colour. I therefore used a variety of photographic techniques to blur and remove all detail therefore representing our detail-less world.

This idea of not seeing when we believe we can, has lead me onto this current project, which tries to capture subjects that the eye is physically incapable of seeing.

‘The Sun’ is the first part of this project, which shows close-up photographs of the sun, bleaching out most of the images to white. Due to its vast brightness, the sun cannot be seen with the naked eye: even when we think we can, we are only ever seeing the bright haze and glare, never the object itself, our visual impression of it is vague.

Mark Excell | 07814927198 | mark.excell@virgin.net | markexcell.com