In a series of 15 still life photos, Denise Weldon takes often ignored, discarded things from everyday life and makes them objects of contemplation that can trigger recollections.
Take the photos of cotton sheets bathed in blue light. Minutely shot, the sheets resemble a mountain landscape at dusk with its ridges and creeks falling into shadow. The photo’s tranquility allows the eye to focus on the cloth’s texture with its tiny creases and folds that can act as points of meditation to channel focus and mindfulness.
The other photos in the series display the same kind of confident equanimity. There are the two bone-white gourds placed askew on cloth with their dried stems sticking out like crooked, wizened fingers. The gourd’s mottled and wrinkly skin is not hidden from view but shown prominently next to another one with its spots of decay also displayed like battle scars. This reflects Weldon’s fascination with the cycles of life and death in nature as with the Latin phrase, natura viva e natura mora. She says, “The photography I like to capture is one in which it elicits that same beauty and awe of nature and allows the viewer to sense that.”
Weldon—a fine arts graduate of Wheaton College in Massachusetts—majored in photography. She is an experienced commercial and editorial photographer in the Asian region and uses a mix of cameras: Phase One, Nikon, Fuji, and Canon. Under her lens, household staples attain sculptural stillness. A lemon placed at the centre of a photo is tilted to the left but lighted from the right casting a painterly effect to the colour of the fruit. Weldon’s fine art practice has always looked closely at these details that are usually treated with indifference. No grand gestures are intended and none are needed when the desire is to capture the silence of being in the moment.
Silence in art forms goes as far back as when Beethoven inserted pauses in his scores. It is the artist’s role to pay attention. The work is sometimes a reflection of where you are in life as you ponder where it is taking you and its nuances, she explains.
