Sophy Rickett
Romantic Artifice
by Mark Durden

There is a compelling simplicity to many of Sophy Rickett’s pictures. In her Untitled Landscapes, (1998) photography is pared down to a simple binary of black and white, dark and light. Only there is always more black than white, more darkness than light. As single projected beams, light appears in these pictures as lines or cuts in the image, an illumination which only partially illuminates. Against the excesses of darkness, more is concealed than revealed.

One of her most spare and minimal pictures— Untitled Landscape-Part VI, 1998— shows nothing more than a sliver of projected light as it illuminates the ground, cutting a horizontal line across the photograph. The panoramic format of the picture itself appears to have been elongated in order to contain the extent of this line of light. This picture of nothing, evokes at once an empty stage and the ‘slashes’ in Luciano Fontana’s canvases or the ‘zips’ in Barnet Newman’s paintings. Only the earthbound horizontality of Rickett’s line counters any connotations of elation and transcendence that would be prompted by verticality.

In other Untitled Landscapes, (1-4, 8,10), figures are there to indicate scale, provide a measure against the blackness. The lone figures against the void have a particular iconic resonance: from Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, The Monk By the Sea to the existentialist closure of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up, with those long shots of the lone, diminutive, disappearing figure of the photographer. Untitled Landscapes (8-11) give a viewpoint looking up and from a distance at what appear to be the railings on bridges, illuminated in such a way they appear as a series of markings, as if calibrating or mapping the empty and ambiguous space. In all of these pictures, the source of light remains out of frame. Yet the panoramic format appears to contain the light, each picture shows us the total extent of its illumination.

Lit in an exaggerated manner, these landscapes draw attention to the process of illumination. But for all the romantic allusions, the metaphorical connotations of light and illumination in these pictures, they also possess a distinctive medium-specificity, a materialism which literalizes and pulls against more metaphysical responses. The banality and ordinariness of the lighting is succinctly and wittily revealed in the reflexive picture showing the lamp illuminating the generator which powers it in Untitled Composition, 1999.

A central concern of Rickett’s is to break with traditional Albertian, monocular perspective, in which the viewer is provided with a fixed and privileged viewing position that serves to draw him or her into the dynamic of the image. In many of her pictures, the foreground is obliterated, or the horizon emphasized to unfix the viewing position, so that the viewer, as Kate Bush has said, “could be anywhere and nowhere”. In more recent works, Playing Fields, London, (2001) and Untitled Landscapes, Rome, (2002), an apparently continuous landscape that stretches over four panels, turns out , on closer inspection, to incorporate viewpoints that shift from image to image. Bereft of the co-ordinates by which we map, measure and ‘enter’ photography’s illusionary space, these pictures hover between flatness and depth. Rickett has spoken of how the effect of “spatial uncertainty and lack of perspectival fixity within the pictures... leaves the viewer out.” Excluded from the images, we tend to scan the photographs, look across them not into them.

In Untitled Landscape, Part 12, 1998, a picture of a blind person's white stick, an opposition between seeing and not seeing is set up. The panoramic format, the simple formal compositional elements— a white line against a black background— underline this picture’s relationship to the rest of the Untitled Landscape series. In many senses, this final addition to the series is a literal joke about perception. Photography details an instrument which helps a non-sighted person to ‘see’. We are looking at something that is not looked at, but felt, physically used as an instrument with which someone without sight is able to physically move around in the world. The image also recalls the way in which an anti-optical notion of sight pervaded thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea of vision as touch. In evoking touch this photograph also highlights the limits of photography. A corporeal engagement with things in the world is of course the very experience the photograph cannot offer. I also see the work in connection with Paul Strand’s powerful portrait, Blind Woman, 1918, in which the subject wears a placard bearing the word BLIND, a documentary image which as David. P. Peeler put it, “sends the mind looping back to photography itself”.

In relation to seeing, her series of panoramic pictures, in which the base and tops of trees are cropped out, Forest 1-3, 2000, is of interest in that the pictures have the appearance not only of photographic negatives but afterimages. They thus evoke an internalised, subjective view. Bereft of light, these dark, flat pictures, also come closest to miming the condition of abstract paintings, an Op Art photography made up the rhythm of vertical grey lines over black.

For Clement Greenberg photography was defined against abstract painting. If for him the essence of modernist painting, meant any content, any narrative association is emptied out of the picture, then the essence of photography concerned narrative, its capacity to tell stories. Photography was closer to literature than painting. Rickett consciously opposes this— “I have never been concerned with making pictures that operate within the realm of ‘what happened next’.” Many of her recent works foreground photography’s non-narrative identity. In doing so they further extend the quality of occluded and incomplete vision that characterises her 1998 Untitled Landscape series. Rickett hyperbolizes the sense of photography missing an event, photography as the act of not seeing something. In these pictures light is linked with an activity taking place out of the picture: the event which lights from behind the trees in her series— Cypress Screen, Dundee (2001)— or in her images, London Studio 1 and 2, (2002) which shows light seeping though the edges of veiling curtains. Rickett has also produced succinct textual works which concern the ‘edges’ of an event, the build up of expectancy signalled in such theatrical cues as: [Music Swells.] CURTAIN or [Enter Ballet and Singers] CURTAIN, (both 1999). These stage directions are printed in the top left of otherwise blank photographs, offering a conceptual and formal variant on the oppositions between seeing and non seeing, event and non-event, narrative and non-narrative, which characterises her photography.

When Rickett uses colour photography, her pictures tend to highlight the synthetic aspect of its colour. Here, as in some of her landscape panoramas, she plays with romantic motifs, for example, the skeletal and cruciform lone saplings of Poplar Plantation, Dundee, 1 and 2,(2001). While the motif might link such pictures with romantic iconography, the lurid light tends to divest them of any transcendence. Yellow sodium light on the saplings gives them a fake and phoney aura. In contrast to the austerity of Poplar Plantation, Dundee, her recent series of pictures, taken on the edges of sportfields in Rome, are much more pictorial. In these nocturnal landscapes, the night sky, formerly reduced to a black void in her pictures, is now an animate and integral element of the image. Some of them appear to have adopted the tradition
al spatial compositions of landscape pictures— the tripartite structure of foreground, middleground and background. Rickett even deploys the repoussoir object of framing trees. But these are pictures in negative in the sense of the generically familiar landscape paintings they might evoke. The lack of daylight makes them the obverse of paintings from nature. These are mock classical landscapes, in which the chemical aspect of night lighting— the ‘pollution’ of the night sky by sodium street lights and the tungsten lights illuminating some unseen sports event, always out of frame, off screen— is set in tension with the landscape motif. Natural landscape views are made unnatural, tainted, stained by light.

Such pictures in their visual plenitude and fullness signal a shift from the starkness of earlier works. They also seem to look more towards the classical landscape tradition and ideal. But in many respects it would be too constraining to see her simply as a landscape photographer. Photography is as much her subject as the landscapes and views she offers us. Rickett’s is an oeuvre in which the integral elements of photography are highlighted and accented. Her landscapes are studies in lighting, scale and perspective. Her most recent series, Untitled Landscapes, (Rome), 2002, are studies in colour photography, the distinctive effect of colour film’s responses to differing types of light.

If one was to look for a key precedent for her work one finds it in certain conceptual photographic practices of the late 1960s and the 1970s. There are affinities here, for example, with John Hilliard’s revelation of the material elements of photography. Hilliard moved from photographs about photography— cameras, darkroom clocks etc.— to landscape, which for him became a means to raise questions about the nature and limits of photographic representation. In a series of diptychs, Over Mount Caburn, 1978, for example, Hilliard presents two different images from the same landscape view, with each picture exposed alternatively for land and sky. Hilliard then went on to explore narrative scenarios, staging events which were often drawn up in terms of antagonist relationships between male and female protagonists. While Rickett has no interest in the narrative possibility and potential of the medium, in many respects she continues Hilliard’s work with landscape, using landscape as a means to accent and highlight photography’s non-narrative and formal possibilities. Her views of nature are mediated and filtered by the processes of photographic representation. Landscape is a motif to play with and against, a romantic and romanticised counterpoint to photography’s artifice.