CAPTURING THOUGHTS WHILE RESTING (2025 – 2026)
Thought: In the dream there was a cake. Outside of the dream, I was on the ferry and then drove a long way to meet the artists and curators. When I arrived there were two beautifully decorated cakes.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Thought: He measured the pulsating energy of the gigantic Poplar tree’s root.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Thought: The colour of the Oriental poppy Papever Orientale.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Thought: Clinging to the mailbox outside the front door was a huge moth about the size of the palm of my hand with brown markings and a large black eye-spot with rings on each of the back wings.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Thought: His voice slow, quiet, hauntingly familiar. “Who am I speaking to?”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Thought: “Regarding that incident at the gallery a few years back, the guys – the Chair was also there, the Guys discussed it over a beer and we all agreed, you know, that you were right but you were wrong. You know what I mean you were right but I mean at the same time you were wrong.”
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Thought: They were dark murky photographs of the night sky. It was twenty or more years ago and I can’t remember the name of the artist or the exhibition.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Thought: I can see her monumental sculptures in Styrofroam cast in bronze. She died of styrene poisoning.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Thought : She is holding two large pieces of tree fungi to the sides of her head, large ears trying to hear something in the forest that perhaps her own ears are incapable of hearing.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In the practice of meditation one trains in awareness of thoughts that arise in the mind. These thoughts cannot be seen nor can they be documented.
However, in the early 1900 when photography was in its infancy, people were experimenting with just this; the use pf photographic means to document the workings of the mind. The question of representing the invisible… the idea that the camera could capture the non-visible seemed plausible. After all, photography represented reality and its documentary indexical nature led naturally to its possibilities outside the empirical, and the idea of capturing thoughts with the help of this mechanical apparatus became of interest.
In 1911, James Coates wrote; To say that the invisible cannot be photographed, even on the material plane, would be to confess ignorance of facts which are commonplace – as, for instance, the mention the application of X-ray photography to the exploration of the muscles, of fractures of bone, and the internal organs. Astronomical photography affords innumerable illustrations of photographing the invisible. In the foregoing, and analogous cases, the photographing is that of material, though invisible objects. And, in 1911 Louis Darget wrote, When the human soul produces a thought it sends vibrations through the brain, the phosphorous it contains starts radiating, and the rays are projected out. Darget believed that he could photograph the inner workings of the mind and in one of his famous experiments he asked his wife to hold a photographic plate about an inch in front of her face in the darkness. When the blurry image was developed, he wrote Dream Photography; The Eagle. With this image he was convinced that he had successfully captured a photograph of thought projected from her brain. In a letter to the French Academy of Sciences in 1904 he claimed that his photographic method could reveal the inner working of the mind.
Madge Donohoe, an Australian journalist of the 1930s made an album of what she called “photographs of thoughts”. The images were produced by holding the photographic plate next to her face or head.
