Artist: Donovan Wylie

Ames Yavuz presents Lighthouse, a solo exhibition by Donovan Wylie. The body of work on view comprises long-exposure photographs of distant lighthouses, visible only by their points of light within vast seascapes; representing both barriers and invitations, closeness and distance.

As in his earlier work, Wylie approaches Lighthouse through a process of “surrendering” to the subject. The neutralisation of authorial subjectivity continues Wylie’s long-standing “systematic approach” as an image-making practice, first seen in his work Maze (2004), in which the contingencies and contextual vagaries of his subject-matter dictate the form and format of the work.

The project began in the wake of the June 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union. Since then, Wylie has photographed the light emitted from lighthouses from across the borders and coastlines of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and France. These photographs were made on specific dates marking events of political, legal or ecological significance. The result of the photographic process in Lighthouse is “an unknowable image” for Wylie, “carved only by the movement of the sea, and the contingencies of light and time”.

The experience of making a photograph — “the act of looking” — becomes the occasion for connection. “Through the long exposures, during which the afterglow of the distant light is captured by the camera, there is a sense of self-dissolution, an intrinsic, embodied connection to nature”, says Wylie. “It’s as if you are standing inside awareness. The act of looking ceases to be an act of possession; it manifests as a relational experience - a form of becoming an invited part of nature, not merely an observer. The experience is transcendent, specifically in the context of coming from a small island still working through its postcolonial identity”.

The photographs are mono-toned and printed on cotton matt paper that holds black pigment ink with an oblique density. The treatment, inspired by black chalk drawings of JMW Turner and his The Eddystone Lighthouse (1817), ground the work in the immediate tangibility of charcoal on paper, rather than the distance of contemporary computational image-making technologies. Here, Wylie quietly hints at the parallels between transformations in photography in the age of AI with that of painting in the 19th century in the aftermath of the invention of photography.

Through the “act of looking” at the lighthouse’ - a storied symbol of longing and distance - the work offers an occasion to the forging of deeper connections. These connections transgress the historical specificities that create and consecrate borders.