Further Information

In 1948, in a surge of fervour about the latencies which large scale abstract painting was then opening up, Barnett Newman wrote an essay called ‘The Sublime is Now’. What followed in his painting was the unfurling of colour on canvas as a sign of Hebrew thought and religion. It exceeded domestic spaces and it invoked spiritual awe and the myths of other religions and other spectacles and sanctuaries. A transcendental kind of painting developed out of this situation which was a revelation to its makers, to Newman and also to Rothko, too.

Now,  every photograph obviously has the capacity to be an occasion for a moment of epiphany and revelation. But photography is hooked so often on to naturalism, as a mode of representation, that photographic revelation and its access to sublimity, is often subdued. These photographs are attempts at restoring some of the pictorial elements which could be bearers of the kinds of revelation that were present in the painting of Newman and Rothko: as moments of divine afflatus- of being possessed by the wind and breath of revelation. The passage and transference of divine breath into the body, its incorporation, had been of primary importance to the priestly rites of ancient Egypt and the ensouling of the mummy’s of the pharaohs and their families, in secreted chambers. It was not for nothing that Freud was fascinated by representations of the spiritual embodiments of ancient Egyptian culture and at the end of his life saw, in Moses and Monotheism, the foundations of Hebrew thought and religion as being a mutation of Egyptian patterns of spirituality. 

But here, in this group of photographs,  Judy Goldhill was concerned with an intersection of her familial identity- figured in its grossest terms as the fabric of an unfinished house– and intuition of a kind of Annunciation addressed to her person, an infusion into her vision and body of the breezes of psychic movement.  The chamber formed by the open room in the photographs is filled with an effulgence of blue, the wind filling the tarpaulins like clouds. This thermal revelation is transfixing and it brings to mind the Hebrew term, Nehemiah. What this concept denotes is the divine breath with an infinite capacity to bring with its transcendence. What Goldhill has made of these artificial-fibre tarpaulins is a luminous reminder of transcendence.  

David Alan Mellor: August  2007