Jessica Eaton: Mariphasa lupina lumina

Throughout Jessica Eaton’s practice, she has delved into the essence of photography, meticulously dissecting its fundamental elements - light, color, temporal dimensions, and the intricate dance of lenses, shutters, film, and filters. Eaton crafts renditions of the world that transcend what is visible to the naked eye. Eaton’s work, existing at the intersection of modernist abstraction, scientific imagery, and the digital age's pervasive influence, offers a profound exploration of the boundaries and speculative possibilities of human vision. 

In Mariphasa lupina lumina, Jessica Eaton presents a vivid exploration of the photographic medium, continuing to expand perceptions of reality and journeys into the realm of the imaginative. The series draws inspiration from a mythical, light-emitting flower featured in the 1935 film Werewolf of London. This reference becomes a metaphor for Eaton's own work—creating images that shine with an otherworldly light and transform the familiar into the extraordinary.

In this series, Eaton's photographs are a sophisticated interplay of reality and invention. She chooses flowers as her subjects, a seemingly simple choice. Yet, like her earlier works using a cube, it is a choice loaded with historical significance. Flowers, with their varied forms and inherent beauty, offer Eaton an opportunity to challenge and expand the limits of photographic representation. Eaton’s practice often creates multiple iterations of a singular subject using a set of variables, through repetition she points to photography as a medium of boundless possibilities beyond faithful representation. Eaton refers to these latest works in the Mariphasa lupina lumina series as her “pressed flowers,” evoking their resemblance to pressed flowers through varying degrees of trompe l'œil bas-relief effects. This technique, where parts of the picture are selectively inverted, is combined with a process of pressing and pulling the pictorial information to extremes, oscillating between negative and positive, capturing Eaton’s ongoing study of custom solarization techniques.

In Mariphasa lupina lumina, Eaton redefines the breadth of photography, blurring the lines between the ephemeral and the eternal. Her work stands as a vibrant dialogue between nature's whimsy and the meticulous craft of the photographer.