Diametric opposition.
Connected by distance.
Connected by sediment.
Connected by a warm heart in a liquid heat.
Connected by a gentle build up.
One that melts in my palm and dries out my skin.
Connected by an echo of a moment.
A memory.
A light source of its own.
A shimmer, registering material and temporal difference in a golden glow.
Now.
When the only way to reach one from the other is to tunnel.
To tunnel into a fire.
A transformative burning that sublimates imagination into action.
To come out the other side – in all of its metaphorical and historical configurations – as a moment remembered.
Remembering that dreams are made in a mineralogical fusing,
that geologies are atmospheric in a literal sense.
Remembering a childhood giggle.
Remembering that salt used to be snow.
||
I watched her mouth as she paused for a moment, and slowly said, “Speed is the only thing that can overtake distance.”1 Speed and dreams, I thought to myself. Like ‘dream,’ ‘core’ is both noun and verb. Its material presence describes its own action. Digging across spatial and temporal distance. A core is an alibi of origins. It’s a marker that states, this came before that and linearity is possible if you truly believe it. And then, hidden from view, the core wraps itself around itself, forming a compressed sphere. A hardened ball of iron. A temporal trick. It resists images, an exposure lasting 4.5 billion years and counting. It’s a metamorphosis that renders itself present.
Now.
Like a thin crust. A membrane that hosts movements from an interior and out. “In the depths of the dream – admitting that it has a depth, a depth that is all surface – is an allusion to a possibility,” that time isn’t stored, or held, or preserved.2 It’s charged, and charging. It’s hot. In time, the dream reveals itself as ambivalent. Capturing in an instant everything it comes into contact with, while leaving that contact vulnerable and exposed. It flickers and falters. A film, a skin, a layer of light.
Exhibition text for Photographic Tunnelling by Emma Hamilton.
Therese Keogh is an artist and writer based on the lands of the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, and pays respects to Elders past, present, and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded.