Objets d’Art

Freed from their functional purpose, I found the cocoons that had been protecting those Chinese pears as featured in recent posts to have, whilst retaining their visual interest as textured surfaces, something of another aesthetic quality altogether (indeed, liberated from their ‘usefulness’, the cocoons could be argued, if one should subscribe to a particular philosophy, to exist now as art, as purely aesthetic objects) & thus suitable further potential as photographic subject matter.

For all their apparent lacy, flimsy, transparent insubstantiality as actual, physically-experienced objects, still, within a photographic context at least, the cocoons retain a sense of form & physicality &, though their shape still echoes that of the pears formerly present within, because of the actual absence of the pears & the consequent ambiguity of scale of the cocoons, a certain structural, sculptural solidity if not, perhaps, the sheer presence & monumentality of the pears, covered or otherwise. Retaining a sense of the weight of the pears formerly contained within also seems to lend the cocoons a sense of substance.

With late afternoon sunlight raking in at a low angle, sharp, imposing shadows were produced & incorporated into some compositions as another element of the whole, in order to add a further dimension, to introduce some complementary dark tonal areas into the overall ‘lightness’.