There the dance is

Jenny Tomlin, Alex Lindesay

Artor Contemporary
12 Fitzroy St, Ponsonby, Auckland

6 - 21 June 2025

Opening Friday 6 June from 6pm.

Hours: Wednesday to Friday; 10am - 4pm
Saturday; 11am - 2pm or by appointment

Part of the Auckland Festival of Photography

Working with pinhole and camera obscura Jenny Tomlin and Alex Lindesay have been investigating how these cameras see differently. They’ve formed a creative dialogue, each responding to the other’s ideas through photography or poetry. The project was initially inspired by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s book ‘The Poetics of Space’. It was felt both Jenny’s pinholes and Alex’s poetry reflected aspects of this and Bachelard’s chapter – ‘Intimate Immensity’ could be describing the experience of being inside a room sized camera.

The camera obscura used is portable and made from a repurposed light tight tent and could be moved around the garden to respond to the constantly changing light. The results are abstracted fragments of garden and suggest other landscapes or spaces. The tent had multiple openings and by selectively opening several it became a multi holed pinhole camera with different versions of the scene outside. It seemed to inhabit several spaces simultaneously.

The poems are a reflection of the experiences - the time spent inside the camera obscura and the pinhole process.

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