Frequency Shift: The Stonehenge Continuum
Artist Statement
On my visits to Stonehenge I sensed a vibrant energy inherent in the stones and surrounding landscape… a unique psychogeography that I wanted to explore in the images I created. I consider the source of this energy to be aligned with its evolving continuum in history… a story that changes over time with the prevailing thought and scientific discoveries of each era. A quote by Frances Mayes comes to mind, from her book, Under the Tuscan Sun:
“Old places exist on sine waves of time and space that bend in some logarithmic motion I’m beginning to ride.”
In modern physics, every “thing” in the universe is wave and particle in nature, measured in wavelength and frequency. “Things” are actually events, continually transforming from the past to the future before ultimately returning to particle form.
To visualize this idea of energy frequencies, I adapted a solarization process influenced by the photographs of Man Ray and Edmund Teske. Tones of an image become reversed… dark to light, light to dark. By layering and juxtaposing multiple solarized images with each other, I convey shifts in frequency. The heightened granularity in the images references the particle nature of the stones in their state of continual transformation.
While producing this work, I thought about the mystery surrounding Stonehenge. Without a written history of its purpose and construction, many theories have been proposed about the monument over time. Myths and legends abounded along with rituals and ceremonies, many rooted in mysticism, astrology, even science fiction. In the last century, new technologies have advanced the story of how and why Stonehenge was constructed.
I feel that these evolving theories shift the frequency of the “thing” that is Stonehenge…along that sine wave that is transforming the past to the future. Is there an immutable “truth” about its origin and purpose? Or is the reality a wave of “frequency shifts” on a continuum of time? My images are a metaphor for this shifting continuum.