Marion Harper : Default

Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne
May 10 - June 8, 1996

I have a confession to make. I was struck by the extraordinary beauty of Marion Harper's work. It was one of those old fashioned encounters with the sublime, where your mouth dries and you are forced to dwell momentarily on those big-somewhat-embarrassing questions of God, nature and forces beyond your comprehension not to mention your control.


Default is an installation in three parts including three large scale brightly coloured duratrans produced using Total Magnetic Intensity (TMI) maps. These brilliantly coloured images look like the products of the Hubble telescope; strange alien terrain of iridescent blue seas and florescent pink mountain ranges. TMI maps are actually maps of the geomagnetic intensities of rock strata located beneath the earth's surface. They are constructed by computer from millions of data points which are generated by airborne instrumentation and then attributed characteristics such as a relief gradient to make them more conventionally legible. They are used by geophysicists to view water tables and search for rich pockets of oil and gas. TMI maps reveal the indivisible world beneath the earths surface. In the context of the gallery these duratrans do not offer up their mysterious contents, but merely allude to the subterranean landscapes of a data world we cannot accurately comprehend. They speak of a mystical world beneath the surface, the promise of whose secrets and fortune so seduced the Professor in Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

Default also includes a 3D animation that rolls hypnotically across a long curved metal screen. The animation is of a series of rocks falling through space colliding and parting, their bodies meeting with soft musical clangs. The rocks spin infinitely through time and space softly knocking together, their heavenly bodies shimmering in and out of materiality. In them we cannot help but recognise our fragile understanding of the creation of the earth, the casual way time is delivered in terms of million of years and the incomprehensible measures of time and movement in the geological world. Compared to these heroic themes Default's artificial rocks look like sad forgotten Hollywood props; all falseness and illusion. Their suspension 'in' the wall serves merely to underline the inadequacy of the knowable geological world compared to the realities born through the TMI maps and the strange Ordovician ballet of the animation.

In science and medicine, new technological image making is far from mimetic but offers a glimpse of strange and alien worlds that can only to be deciphered with an understanding of a precise visual language and a precise technical purpose. In dealing with these new visions which are made possible through technological advances, there remains the illusion that, like the discovery of the microscopic world these are a part of a hidden world that lies just beneath the surface; a world that improved technology simply renders visible. However, in the case of the TMI maps that feature in Harper's work, the image reveals a totally artificial vision of a world that may be based in scientific fact but must be moulded out of data. The TMI maps belongs to the creation of an artificial vision of an unseeable reality. As Peter Morse has stated in the catalogue for Default, the data of TMI is doubly unseeable; 'on one hand because the state they represent is obviously subterranean, on the other because the physical values they measure are not optical in nature'.

Harper, unlike most artist who work with technology and who thrash it out in the everyday world of media based technology, of household VDUs and shopping centre ATMs, has insinuated herself into a world of unique technological imaging. In placing these images in the gallery, Harper has not left us merely to marvel at their abstract beauty or that they are the by-products of strange new ways of seeing but has rendered their extraordinary content to us as the sublime, an unknowable and powerful reality as opposed to scientific data. The true incomparable greatness of the earth continues to allude the possibility of the simple phenomenal experience. Harper, in exploring new scientific means of representing the unrepresentable, in examining the artificial visions of the unseeable realities of the earth's core, re-awakens the sublime.

© Helen Stuckey, 1996
MESH film/video/multimedia/art #10,MESH is published by Experimenta Media Arts