#stevemccullagh

I found myself standing at traffic lights waiting for the green man. Whilst I was absentmindedly staring into space, my dog Phil pulled towards the street bin for a sniff. I have always to look ahead of him to make sure he’s not sniffing at something he intends to eat. All clear, nothing harmful there, I loosened the lead. I did, however, notice an odd collection of books neatly piled beside the bin. Having always collected found objects of note to bring home, I didn’t think twice before bending down to pick up the book on top. It was old and weathered, the cover was a soft green material, broken edges and the covering spine was off to one side. It was still tightly bound and the title was clear, Freshwater Tropical Aquarium Fishes by Hervy & Hems. I flicked through it in one motion, seeing illustrations of fish dotted throughout. The drawings were enough for me to choose to take the book with me. The green man appeared, and we walked on to work.

Arriving at the studio I made coffee and sat down at the desk to look more closely at the book. I opened it randomly, ending up near the end, page 382. A strange looking fish drawn in pencil revealed itself. Half in and half out of the water, it appeared as if stretching using its fins to prop itself up onto land. There was a dignified ugliness to it, it seemed determined and proud with huge goggle eyes and outstretched fins. Underneath, a caption “Fig. 85. Periophthalmus barbarus”. What a strange fish.

‘A mudskipper’ it said as I started to read the description:

“It is a characteristic of these fishes that they spend more time out of water than in it. While out of water they keep the large gill-chambers filled with air and very often leave the tail hanging in the water, or otherwise keep it moist, to serve as an added organ of respiration. They remain out of water for hours on end, almost motionless, contemplating passing objects and occasionally snapping at flies”.

‘Contemplating passing objects’ an unusual thing to say about a fish, I thought. Do they really leave the water to experience the land? They ‘remain motionless for hours’, what else could they be doing, I’d guessed.

In the studio at the time, I was mostly photographing a particular rock I had found. The rock itself had no significance other than being an object for my cameras to try and understand. I thought if I used different cameras, film, digital and polaroid, each with their own idea of what was presented to them, I might come to illustrate something about perception and its subjective nature, or at least I could try. I had begun to consider the space between things and my own perception of the world, and that perception as a singular object. The idea of space started to expand and I wondered if there was something more than just distance between us. If we looked out to sea, do we see it the same way? I don’t know. I would go to the coast and look out there thinking about what could be getting lost in the space between us.

And I would make pictures there.

The mudskippers, it seemed to me, were little perceptual devices, just watching. As if they were trying to make sense of what they could see on land. I wondered about their experience in this world, and about the space of their consciousness and if a fish contemplates, what is it that holds their attention? Clearly these fish are very important creatures and so I set about finding them. I wanted to study them more closely. To see if they could shed any light on the questions I had been posing myself. Or just to be near them, to be in their field of vision and subject to their scrutiny. To feel the space between us as we both contemplate a life on land.

“Life on Land” 2018 Platform Arts Belfast. 

Mudskippers are amphibious fish. They can walk on land by using their fins, and have panoramic sight through eyes mounted high on their heads. They spend most of their time out of water, on a shoreline or clinging to rocks. There they remain motionless for hours, perhaps in the act of contemplation while perceiving the world around them.

Life on Land is a body of work that was presented at Platform Arts in Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 2018. This solo exhibition comprised of large-scale prints, exhibited with mudskipper fish as a living nucleus to the install. The work addressed the phenomenology of space and perception, studied through the photographic medium.

A series of 54x44 inch seascapes appear to float from the walls, a glass tank with a crafted shoreline is placed at the centre inhabited by four mudskippers, daylight washes over the space through six windows placed on one wall, one of which is coloured tungsten shining a block of contrasted light panning over the space as the day rolls on. Occasionally the sound of fins skipping over shallow waters from the mudskippers movements breaks the silence  and so defuses the mudskippers space throughout the gallery.

A consideration of the space between objects and perception itself is the point of departure with this work. The viewer is asked to question what is lost or misunderstood in the act of perception. Through the addition of incongruous physical space within the camera apparatus during the photographic process, these photographs have lost their detail and miscommunicated their subject, the sea. Yet, what is produced is an image not entirely dissimilar to what we may perceive as the sea, in a sense perhaps captured is a certain essence of it, as if distilled down to it prototypical components. While lacking in details an impression is communicated, information is still provided.

A theme of subjective perception runs through the work and is addressed by considering the space between two perceiving bodies, conscious or otherwise. The visitor is tasked with considering their perception of the sea parallelled against the camera’s suggestion of it. At the same time, they are asked to consider the mudskipper’s perception of the world around them parallelled against their own. The space between two perceiving bodies can never be overcome; the same position will never be achieved simultaneously, as we cannot enter into each others’ being, and so the path of perception from object to perceiving body will always be different. It will always be subjective.

Through the mudskippers constant and inevitable perception of their surroundings they carry a function of sustaining the existence of the show by keeping a perception of the space active in their consciousness. Once a visitor enters the space they join in the act of perception with the fish. Underpinning perception itself as an object being exhibited but of course individual and unique to each visitor.

The work is accompanied by two commissioned texts by Dr Francis Halsall, Co-Director of the Masters Program: Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD in Dublin and Dr Ruby Wallis, lecturer at Burren College of Art BA & MFA programs in Galway. These texts will expand on theoretical concerns embedded within this project and will be paired with a photographic study of a single rock illustrating various phenomenological thought processes.

Installation view  (image by Vincent O’Callaghan)

15:1, Remote Photo Festival, The Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal.  2017. 

Left to right 

Digital Rock Touch screen 35 x 25 cm (Framed) 2017

Latent Negatives Fine art digital print    27 x 21 cm  2017

Fragmented Polaroids Polaroid collage 21.7 x 15.7 cm 2017

Rock Itself  Artefact 12.5 x 11.2 cm Eternal 

A Single Negative (loop)

 2017