oublier
Commissioned for the European week of photography in Reggio Emilia, Italy 2006. Photographing in the private parts of public buildings in Reggio Emilia, these works mine the faultline or border between the accessible and the secreted. Made primarily in attics and basements they continue to explore borders, both physical and psychological. On a literal level the photographs examine the boundary that lies between public and private space, darkness and light, the visible and invisible - but they also explore the boundaries of consciousness and indeed parameters of available light and the limits of the photographic medium itself. Absence is a deep-seated aspect of the phenomenology of photography and much of Seawrights work examines that which isn't easily described. With typical parsimonious framing the photographs demand a non-literal reading. Peering into the blackness of these dark places they come to represent a place of forgetting or more radically, an oubliette of the mind.
