Language of shadows, language of emotions

Language of shadows
language of emotions

The shadow has always fascinated me. It is repeatedly tricky, always in all-ways adjustable, changeable, appearing, disappearing then again reappearing. It is the part of the everyday that is often taken for granted and thus quickly overlooked. Why then do we have shadows? To understand shadows - dark areas where direct light from a light source cannot reach due to obstruction by an opaque object, areas that are barely noticeable, ungraspable, odorless, silent, it might help to look at caricatures.

Caricatures, a likeness or imitations so exaggerated or distorted as to appear ridiculous have always been used to accentuate or direct attention to something that would otherwise go unnoticed. The same goes for the shadow. In its appearance and its function it seems to be like a caricature: to accentuate in the world around us that which we would maybe otherwise not notice, and then - to disappear from our perception!

Yet however minute its role and its fate of falling into oblivion given to it by nature, the dimension of the shadow is really great: it encompasses in itself everything that exists. Every being and every object has its own shadow. A bird casts a shadow, a table casts a shadow and so i have a shadow and my car has a shadow as well. We exist in particular bodies, yet we belong to the community of shadows. At the same time the shadow belongs to all, is common to all. i see the shadow thus as the collective - as the visual collective, to distinct it from Jung’s collective unconscious. One might even say that Jung's collective unconscious might be visualized by shadows. The shadow in its constitution of the visual collective appears to be a common expression of all and for all, independent from the organic and inorganic, from gender and age, from the coordinates of past and future.

When shadows collide, they fuse into one another, accepting each other. Unburdened with prejudice they communicate with everything and everyone - for me they are the language of equality and justice. Not bounded by culture or time and freely crossing borders of any kind they seem to embody within themselves a universal language. We intuitively understand it yet we are at large unaware of it. The purpose of my Gr@y Matter - shadow alphabet is thus precisely this – to make us aware of the gray expressions surrounding us, of the visual language that shadows non- aggressively and freely display for everybody.

Being in between black and white shadows acquire all hues of gray, grey, coined by me gr@y to encompass all levels of perceiving, and also both spellings as well as uniting the analog and the digital process in my creation of my shadow images. Gr@y is neither white nor black, good nor bad, eastern nor western, organic nor inorganic, male nor female - it is the potential to be one or the other. Shadows thus provide us with a wealth of potentialities comprising a language of their own.

To me shadows primarily enable communication through association to primal emotions which they produce in one when being looked at. Thus i see shadows, besides being a communicator - communicating our state of existence, also as being the visualization of this primal language - the language of emotions that is common to all.

Emotions in many ways seem to me to be similar to shadows: everyone has them, whether one is aware of this or not. In fact, the emotional traits in us are those which primarily kept us alive as a species. Similarly as the shadow often goes unnoticed, also genuine emotions are often pushed into the shadow, both metaphorically as well as literary. Thus it appears natural to me to rely on emotions and emotional states to convey the language of shadows.
For this purpose i borrowed the skeleton of the periodic table of chemical elements from the natural sciences. I replaced its chemical elements with my shadows representing emotions and emotional states, stemming from different sequences of shadows. Out of this periodic table of emotions filled up with shadows a language of shadows expressing emotions is thus hopefully formed.

Shadows both as words and as images of their language are gr@y cells of my work, the breeding ground from which new ideas might stem. Actually the shadows in my periodic table offer the space for action where emotions CAN be put into motion, all these expressing our emotional existence, parallel to the chemical and physical one.
In the presence of both, the shadow and emotion, we are object and subject; that upon which light acts to produce shadows as well as that upon which thoughts act producing emotions.

Gr@y Matter - The Language of Shadows encompasses a collection of my so called black and white, but in reality predominantly gr@y analog photographs of my shadows. i manipulated many of these manually in the dark room creating unique images without negatives to illustrate building blocks of my periodic table. As the table of elements offers different elements with which things can be formed and existence takes its toll, so also my table of shadows aims to offer separate emotions, emotion's building blocks with which also complex emotions or emotional states may be formed in reactions of different separate emotions.

The language of shadows is not dependant upon words. One can of course also use words to communicate about the shadow, though here one depends on the understanding of a particular language to understand what is being communicated. However the images of shadows comprising the language of shadows go beyond this. In this i see its universality: there is no need for translation in order to understand it!

However, one has to be careful when speaking of its independent existence. As the shadow, neither completely black nor completely white, exists visually and metaphorically in a variety of hues of gr@y in between - the question which particular tone will come to the surface depends on the subjective analysis of the particular interpreter. As a result of both, objective and subjective analysis, the language of shadows depends ultimately on its interpreter, acquiring thus just one out of the many possible interpretations. Therefore the language of shadows as presented in this book can not be claimed as something certain, as something that "is", but rather as something that "may be", expressing as such the true nature of shadows - their never diminishing quality of potentiality.

Nothing is then certain with shadows except the fact that they are here - as long as light is here and something in between to block it. Existing and by this influencing, thus communicating, expressing their language, be it by appearing big, funny, scary, soft, dark, the shadows can scare, amuse, deceive, warn, highlight, keep us company and just as quickly disappear from our sight. Faithfully, silently and non-aggressively yet nevertheless actively and directly they remind us that perhaps we are not so far from being like them - fragile, flexible and forever dependent upon light both to see them, as well as exist.
Eva Petrič

PS: !Statements, associations, ideas - tightly knotted like a ball of yarn, I manage nevertheless to find a loose end
AND
I pull on it - like a ball of yarn it unravels, the trace of its tongue leaving a trail of words lingering behind, searching for shadows...!