2007 JUAN FORD: 100,000 LUX

EXHIBITION IMAGES

Skin is the canvas of shadows. Year after year, between you and the harsh Australian sunlight, high in the cloudless blue skies of a desiccated summer, the skull of vanity flies, a brace of fresh green gum-leaves clenched between its teeth or rammed like cascading vertebrae into its foramen magnum. Stripped of flesh, eyeless and breathless, gleaming and pale, the skull grins as skulls do, rigid with the ecstasy of its flight through our Asian South. As it passes above you, the shadow arabesques of the leaves fall on your face or back. Because it is between you and the sun, you'll never see the skull with your own eyes, only sense its presence through closed lids, or as it whizzes past behind your head. The skull exists only in other frames, in another's frame. In your own, it haunts you with its unseen quotidian chiaroscuro. Blinded by the sun, you close your eyes, and that's when you're hit full in the face by the dappling of the leaves, your vision rammed back into itself, your momentary blindness an aesthetic experience for the eyes of others. Or you sense something uncanny, the infinitesimal shimmering of light and shade on your bare back, and you turn your head slightly, unaccountably bemused. Like a brief and painless tattoo, like random smears of face-paint, like the unearned neurological scars of an incredible disease, the instant will pass with the death's-head's passing. One day it will not pass, and you will enter into this blindness forever. Branded like the cattle of an absent master, open to the sockets of the empty future, each painted image falls like a fleeting shade on the living retina, and is gone.

Dr Justin Clemens Department of English, University of Melbourne