Essay in response to Tricks of the Trade (2020-2021) commissioned for Light Work’s Annual (2021)
“Cameras organise visual experience, remaking three-dimensional space in two dimensions according to precise structural protocols. Most of the time, the perspectival rules imposed by the lens are not the subject of the image. For some photographers, however, the work done by the apparatus is the focus of their practice. Jan McCullough’s work explores the ways that the camera encounters and transforms built space, and the ways that real space interacts with its own photographic representation. Using sketchbooks, photographs and installation, McCullough charts a path from object to image and back again, revealing the creative potential embodied in our everyday encounters with lived space.
In photographs of the installation that McCullough built for her recent exhibition, Tricks of the Trade, the raw timber structure that fills the room resembles an architectural drawing that has been superimposed onto a view of the gallery space. These installation shots, in which two seemingly disparate spaces occupy the same image, are more than just documents of her work: they hint at the role that photography plays in her practice as a whole. Photography is the background and backbone of McCullough’s work: a way of mediating her experience of space, and a prompt and a paradigm for creating new spaces. For McCullough, the camera and the photograph are tools not simply for representing objects and spaces, but for reconfiguring their form and function.
Notions of construction and reconstruction play an important role in McCullough’s practice. Much of her early work is based around instruction manuals and procedures for organising space. She has a longstanding fascination with the places where things are created and assembled: industrial sites, workshops, sheds and garages. The arrangement of these sites, and the ad-hoc structures and systems that are created within them, alludes to the more far-reaching ways that we humans locate and establish ourselves in space.
McCullough’s practice has always involved sketchbooks and photographs, including an extensive archive of her own images of industrial spaces. The latter are more than just records, they are the source of shapes and forms that are further transformed in later stages of her work. Shot with a powerful flash, which singles out details from the surrounding environment, McCullough’s photographs reduce individual features to outlines, in much the same way that a ‘section’ in an architectural drawing lays bare the structure of a building by reducing three dimensions to two. Here, the camera acts as an instrument for analysing and dissecting space. Unlike the dispassion of the architectural section, however, McCullough’s images bring a totemic quality to these fragments.
Using techniques such as photocopying, enlarging, cutting out, and painting on photographs, McCullough transforms individual shapes into new objects and spaces. Until recently, these secondary forms have existed as collages and other two-dimensional constructions. For Tricks of the Trade, however, McCullough has built actual structures in response to and in dialog with her photographs and sketchbooks. Using pattern cutting and industrial assembly techniques, she recreates fragments and sections of space, destabilising them, transforming them beyond functionality. These built forms can be thought of as three-dimensional analogues of her collages. The photograph is not an end point in this process; instead, it plays a more fluid role, transforming and being transformed, part of a series of actions that blur the distinction between the physical and the visual.
Rational and rule-based as it might initially appear, McCullough’s engagement with space is highly subjective. It is driven by sensory and corporeal dimensions such as colour, texture and smell; informed by the routines and habits through which particular spaces are laid out and used; understood in terms of its relationship to the body. With Tricks of the Trade, for example, the lofty structure in the gallery space attempts to recreate the ‘nest-like’ sensation that she experienced in the site where the original photograph was taken.
Henri Lefebvre famously distinguished between lived space (those places we occupy and use) and abstract space (space as a political instrument, controlled and traded as a commodity). As a tool for spatial planning, the camera is part of the machinery of abstraction. In McCullough’s practice, however, the camera is a means of bridging the gap between abstraction and lived reality, embodying structural rules alongside more subjective qualities such as memory and imagination. Tricks of the Trade makes tangible a commonplace assumption that is more substantial than it might first appear: that the camera is not just a tool for rationalising space, but also, like any instrument, a means of finding new ways to create it.”
- Eugenie Shinkle