Vanessa Filley – The Shape of Time

Description

These two pieces are from my Presence of Absence series begun during the initial Shelter in Place order last March when our lives as we know them seemed to disappear. My creative practice is rooted in photography, but during the pandemic I have mostly traded my camera for thread, pinpricks and paint as a way of marking and digesting the emotions of time. The threads here are a method of binding, of stringing one moment to the next to create a shape reflecting the weight of collective experience, drawing lines of connection as in a constellation, one star linked to the next.  While the pinpricks are both a way to puncture a surface, a forced impact, but also a way of allowing light to pass through. The pinpricks are also an homage to the pin-hole camera in which through a mere puncture to the surface a whole world floods through; each of these pinpricks hold the possibility of a world reemerging. The act of making these pieces has been a meditation on both what is and what is not in this time, the worlds we hold within ourselves despite any current loneliness and an understanding that we are as humans connected beyond blood, love and conversation sharing breath and bodies made of stardust and the possibility of unspoken connection.