susanpurdy.net

‘UNDERSTORY – from the Collected Works of Susan Purdy 2004 – 2016’  21 February – 19 March 2016   Gecko Studio Gallery

Susan Purdy flies under the radar so far as possible. An introvert by nature she prefers to observe from the sidelines than stand in the spotlight. As an artist she is not interested in art world fame but she is thoroughly ambitious for her art practice and actively seeks out an audience for it. Art is at the centre of her life and she continues her dedication to working in her Gippsland studio, pushing the boundaries of ideas and materials.

Her subject matter is, and always has been, the connection to nature she feels.

Her creative quest is to make this experience visible, live on the page, to marshal the forces of light and energy and translate the untranslatable.

The key to making this happen using the photogram process, and for the viewers understanding of the medium; the elements of nature used to make these images are recorded rather than imagined or described. They are found and placed by the artist. As a record, they retain the direct connection, the exact shape and size of the object printed – nature’s presence is contained and continues within the space of the paper. This faithful imprint making a fundamental link with nature that holds the work, creating the firm base upon which a delicate shadow play is performed.

The way photograms are made is very much a performance; in the darkened room light sensitive paper is unwrapped and objects placed on its surface. When every detail has been attended the exposure is made – a moment in time, a sudden flash and the light is conducted, directed and withheld – using hands and little makeshift wands to dodge, and card with holes to burn the places of the print which need to darken down. This complicated dance has its own written score that is tested, refined and adjusted.

A lengthy planning culminates in this fleeting testing moment – the delivery requiring a warriors precision and speed – for those few seconds it is make or break.

The artist has not invented these objects and is not responsible for their existence - they remain themselves, their inherent beauty shines through. Her job is to understand and skilfully employ the photomedia; to use her experience to predict that certain arrangements will hold power, will give the landscape a voice that can be heard. And so the work comes into being as a collaboration between the artist and the natural world - that is always and freely offering up its rich bounty. This generosity and love rewards the close and fine attentions of the artist, and is made available to others through her images. They are reminders and messages from nature, wanting to be reclaimed.

Susan Purdy lives and works in the Strzelecki Ranges, in Gippsland, on the South Eastern corner of Australia. Her work is focused upon reinterpretation of early photographic practices. It is in a number of significant public collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria.

ARTIST STATEMENT

In Understory, the artworks are shaped more like the spaces between trees in a forest than the regular rectangular window frame. They offer slim glimpses of a subtle, quieter spaciousness and describe the experience of reading and knowing the land, being amongst animals, birds and plants, breathing in and out the cool fragrant air of the understory. Strangely sparse images recalling the vitality of the forest.

I have experimented with many different forms for my work in the past, from 21 metres of continuous imagery (‘the lost forest’ - part of which is currently on display in ‘Now is the Hour’ at Latrobe Regional Gallery) to miniature cameos, I have made an effort to shake up the way my work deals with representing space and to sidestep the usual expectations of a viewer. I want to use my work to explore form, to understand space and slippage, to discover the hidden powers of spatial arrangements and geometries. The work is essentially still experimental.

There are more possibilities than you would initially think in a small collection of thin black strips of paper. Turning the strip sideways creates a panoramic view with provocative and interesting formal qualities. Presented both vertically, horizontally and individually, in pairs and groups of threes, the works read like a sequence of the Roman numerals; 111, 11, and 1, a dash, and the ‘equals’ are symbols also formed. Also, each picture is mysteriously a number.

Nothing is uniform in this collection of images, yet order is still clear. It seems evident that rhythm plays a big part in visual organisation, somehow connecting with the beating heart and the throb of life sensed all around.

The Mysteries of Pollination suggests invisible circulations, and ancient flowing journeys of pollen through our air, propelled on seasonal winds, away to where, like lock and key, a fit is made and the spark of new life is struck. The cell divides in two.

The air is full of things we do not see; pheromones, pollen, dust, and carbon.  Its particles continually fall around us, floating alongside and moving freely into and out of our bodies. Alive to this perception these art works speak about other ways that time can be measured and experienced, with its many living rhythms. The works present a parallel perspective, making adjustments to our normal view.

Inhale/Exhale divides our breath into a rhythmic pair. Following the breath connects our mind and body in awareness. These pairs come together to complete the whole. Tension exists in pairing, a paradox that seems particularly potent. Male and female parts are both essential to creation. The pulse of sensation between polarities is the energy of life.

The views suggested by this work signal big shifts in perspective; our eyes range from close inspection of orchids flowering secretly on the forest floor to distant mountains and the starry night sky.

Duality is ever present.

Near and Far are also a pair.

Long Black Veil was exhibited at Latrobe Regional Gallery, 29th November - 25 January 2015

There is pathos in Long Black Veil that speaks to a sadness in all of us. It’s a message from the artist’s deep unconscious and we receive and inhabit it through the work. Its sombre tenor is at once specific, personal and universal. A response to both natural and manmade disaster - the works worry at the ideas of encroachment and breach – the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima – the choking particulate, sooty rain of rampant coal fires here. But the work is bigger than protest or politics - it’s lucid, prophetic, painterly and experimental. Though the subject matter may be sobering each image’s innate beauty still manages to lift the heart.

Exquisite, images are assembled in a marriage between the silver gelatin photogram and colourful Dada-esque collage. The base notes are overwritten with embossing, casein and iridescent paints. The lightness of touch is masterly – the works deeply emblematic and affecting.

In contrast with the often-restricted palette of camera-less photography, this work is jewel-like. Purdy’s signature ability to play with lustre - to print up warm blacks and pearl-like silvers is still key. But to this she has added collage - talismanic eyes, shields, pods and egg-like ovals. Protected, enclosed, private they play with the balance between the interior and exterior selves - the selves that are cocooned and the selves that have to brave the soot clouds of coal fires and the radioactive currents of contaminated seas.

Some of the small works in the exhibition are grouped - single, elliptical, aluminum-backed objects – vignettes if you will – hung as an assemblage. They can be read as a unit or as fragments – like a shoal of fish working as one or scattering into their constituent bright beings. They reference eggs and orbs but they might also strike you as barnacles or insect wings - all of them elegant geometries with milk casein paint applied to suggest encoded meaning. Some take their titles from Japanese words for feeling and movement – koboreru - to spill or overflow,  kanjiru- to feel, and to sense and tsukeru- to turn on, to light. The trope of falling water - delicately overpainted in iridescence, appears in a number of these works yet it is the oval form that unites them. Perhaps a reference to early photography, the cameo speaks also of containment.

In the Earth series gourds, leaves, finely branched roots, thorns and desiccated spiders appear. The bobbing feather of a Powerful owl seems to suggest tenuous balance in Overburden. Notched leaves are assembled into a prickly echidna in Schism; collaged pods seem the dangerous fruit of grassy stems and naked roots in Tremor.

Works in the Ethics series include the title image, Long Black Veil – pendulous and played in a minor key they hint at a pervasive damage – one which runs back all the way to white invasion. Like a caged bird, Possession encloses and curtails. Light seems to travel branches with a pure intensity before being refracted by something stronger - more powerful, into chinks of colour. There is a sense of highly charged energy – something that might corrupt or encroach. In Plum Blossoms - a diptych and perhaps the most beautiful and spare print in this body of work – the barren branches do not bloom. A fine fog of blue – slightly chemical in colour, creeps across the dark background like the foxing found on the pages of old books.

Sensitivities are aptly named. They hint at the vulnerability of the body. Seemingly robust we can be prey to all kinds of contaminants – spores, dust, ash, radioactivity. Here again casein paint is used atop the silver gelatin photogram to enclose or encase the delicate images. In some lights it can read as an eerie luminescence. Both Sneeze and Sphincter are highly evocative. The latter made from the spore print of a mushroom, the former seeming to escape the flimsy bars of its container all too easily – as sneezes do. Seethe almost emits a buzzing it is so highly charged – the spread of insect attacked leaves not quite drawing the eye from the almost itchy pod.

Drift is a collaboration with printmaker, Rosalind Atkins and has led to the incorporation of etching in Purdy’s photography. Like cut gems, vastly magnified eucalypt and myrtle pollens drift across the tessellated photograms somehow marrying the  close-up and the distant. The middle ground has been cut from under us. A confounding vertigo has us lean into and away from the images. These two big works are an assembled grid – an archive, a highly figured documentary – made from eighteen separate pieces across which a pall of smoke drifts and pollens free fall. 

Despite an inherent beauty the message is urgent: dust, smoke and particulate pollutants are borderless invaders – they travel the wind, they marry with the dust beneath us, we track them about in our hair, clothes and shoes. They leave a trace of themselves in us – an unwanted memory. This is a warning. The wind is constantly lifting a veil of dust from under us – it is no wonder we feel unsteady on our feet.

Carolyn Leach-Paholski

November 2014

*The title Long Black Veil comes from a 1959 country ballad written by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin.

POSTCARDS FROM JAPAN 2103

Susan Purdy's photographic practice is a passionate response to serious current environmental events, while being deeply engaged with the history of the photographic medium.

These works portray ecological circumstances where containment is breached – as with the disasters of Fukashima and Hazelwood – and the many particulate things that fall: dust, pollen, sand, carbon, snow.

It evokes the pall of smoke that engulfed and stifled Morwell during the recent pit fire and draws a parallel with the overflow of contaminated water at the Fukashima nuclear plant, acknowledging the grief and mourning experienced by communities effected by such calamitous events.

Bringing together the artist's accumulated knowledge of Japanese and European visual arts traditions, with the immediacy of personal experiences in the Latrobe Valley and Japan, Purdy presents multilayered works which reflect her desire to champion and encourage human sensitivity toward the environment.

Susan Purdy’s Insect Photograms

A Bee in my Bonnet

Susan Purdy made her insect prints through a long, wet winter and although they speak of the natural world, they have an interior quality too. The landscape is highly tooled and finely wrought. It is imaginary, perhaps even fevered but no less likely than what is evident under a microscope. At this magnification the pedestrian is exotic and the augmentation of our powers seems heady. There is a fascination with size and scale here. It is a trick for the eye and it depends for its success on an element of theatre. We are familiar with bees but Purdy’s bee is made big for us, big enough to really see. Automatically our point of view is adjusted. The notched legs and finely furred abdomen are affecting – somehow strokeable. The banding is as distinct at this register as tiger stripes. This bee is knowable too because she is singular. She is an individual seen in isolation from the swarm. Her otherness is tempered by her arresting beauty, by her intention and apparent enterprise. All these things we miss in encounters with real bees - enlarged and held still we can absorb the details. What we might usually regard fearfully as the stinging end is in fact prettily skirted and the twiggy legs at magnification are as shapely as fine Georgian furniture.

Cicada Song

If Purdy’s bee is bold, business-like and certain – her cicada seems like a prayer cast into the void. It is an image seemingly lit by phosphoresce. It speaks of night. There is a sense of the time the sleeping cicada has spent underground - a lost soul which overwintered for an eternity, sipping on the sap of tree roots to survive until some trick of light, some shift or tilt in the earth alarmed it into life. Whereas the bee heads into the frame, the cicada seems about to flee - seventeen years of purgatory to put behind it. The very spareness of this composition is resonant. The cicada flees darkness into the unknown and unknowable. Whereas the big bee flanked by her fruit and flowers seem torpid and hot-housed, this image is as a cool cloth to a fevered brow. Once again the trompe l’oeil is one of size and resizing.

Night Blooming Cereus

This print is a spectacle – a hymn to the mesmerizing symmetry of flowers and somehow the night flying cicada is part of it – part of the highly perfumed, teeming whole. The passion flower, (top left), is a complexly engineered lure. Moths, birds, bees, night busy bats find it irresistible; decoding the visual dynamics they drink from the flowers direct. But there is more than a natural history lesson happening here. The composition is tight. The wing-fingered bat takes flight into a nocturnal rush hour. The large, tightly petalled orbs of chrysanthemums act like suns - suns that shine from a nether world, both febrile and interior.

Pollination

The bee has returned to nectar at flowers again. This time it climbs the image. It has the ambulatory awkwardness of a blowfly - a posture familiar to gardeners. Kneeling to pull a weed we sometimes meet a beefy bee head-on and this is their signature move on a flower head. Seeming to swarm into its centre, they sip at the nectar, back-up, their socks bulging with pollen balls and lunge like a weighty helicopter into flight. Purdy has made us a speck in a wide and wonderful world. She illuminates what we might otherwise ignore. Perhaps from this perspective we can learn to feel less alone.

Carolyn Leach-Paholski

Spring 2011

NervousSystem was exhibited at Gallerysmith in Melbourne, November 11  ~  10 December 2011

Artist Statement

This past winter found me in a frightening place. My own body, the bodies of others and landscapes I treasure – under attack; Illness, injury, the threat of death.

I was forced to recognise that an eventual confrontation with tragedy cannot be escaped. Indeed, tragedy surrounds us: an essential part of life, in the same way that predation is necessary to life. 

My task then was to find visual equivalence for the deep primal anxiety of annihilation persistent in the psyche. To image this new understanding of how I was experiencing emotion: as a nuanced throb and echo of adrenaline and fright, pulsing into the tiniest branches of my nervous system.

Ah, the effort required to push through numbness, to push against my resistance and look into the heart of suffering. To give visceral visual description to the intensity and flutter of my hair triggered impulses: escape! survive!

And in the process of engagement, in the searching for and making of the images, I find myself changing; shifting into a new acceptance.

In the delicate and responsive light sensitivity of the paper I soften and find compassion for the depth of my feelings.

An understanding that sensitivity brings with it sorrows and joy; Life calls for a willing vulnerability and courage.

Making the work, I've understood how important, how truly vital is the art of metaphor. All the plants I'd chosen were desiccated, dried up like my feelings. But making them into pictures has unexpectedly given them new life, and in the process I too became revived and re-hydrated.

I've learned how, under cover of darkness, hope grows back, forging its way through tiny capillaries, and developing tender new roots.

                                                                                                   Susan Purdy                                                                                                    November 11 2011

Seddon Archives - Tamara Saulwick - writer/director  collaborating with Susan Purdy on visual elements.

An audio walk for one including a shop window display of a grid of photograms

Seddon Archives: part audio-walk, part installation and part performance, is a contemplation of the connections between time, place, event and memory. Equipped with headphones and an mp3 player as their guide, participants walk unaccompanied through Seddon's streets immersed in a sound world that uncannily knits the present with the past, fact with fiction, and memory with imagination. Created in part from interviews with local residents and in part from a range of field recordings which have been processed, cut up, and rearranged; pre-recorded sounds intermingle with the here-and-now, memory and imagination merge, fact blurs with fiction, and time and place are uncannily reconfigured. Quiet streets are layered with recollections both strange and familiar, and unassuming doorways are suddenly imbued with the sense of what may lie behind.

Seddon Archives was created for the Big West Festival 2011

http://tamarasaulwick.com/seddon-archives-1/

‘A great silent space holds all of nature in its embrace. It also holds you.’[1]

This commission is an installation of 72 individual images constructed as a narrative, 21 metres in length,  for the TarraWarra Museum of Art 's exhibition BUSHFIRE AUSTRALIA 28 March - 25 July 2010

Gelatin silver photogram (unique state) 306 x 21000 mm

AUSTRALIA PHOENIX, SUSAN PURDY

A huge plume of smoke arose from the Jeeralang hills on Black Saturday, moving swiftly up a valley towards Susan Purdy’s South Gippsland home. As she prepared for evacuation, asudden wind change swept the fire front away from her house, to wreak havoc elsewhere.

From the verandah of her weatherboard cottage, Susan Purdy has long cultivated an intense interest in her local landscape. In the 25 years she has lived in the Strezlecki Ranges, she has witnessed inadequate forest management and a decline in biodiversity. This has caused her to reflect deeply on the fragility and transience of nature.

Purdy’s practice reflects these interests. Ghostly white photograms on flat black paper draw directly from local fauna and flora. They create moving narratives of the conflictswhich can occur when humankind sees itself as separate from nature. 

Rather than reflecting on a single encounter with bushfire, Australia Phoenix chronicles the cyclical phenomenon of fire over hundreds of thousands of years, and the role humanity plays in shaping that phenomenon.

The first section of the long sequence refers to the cosmos and a universally understood language of creation. A tension starts to build when an isolated island, with its unique blend of unique species, is exposed to new arrivals. The burgeoning tension swells to the brink, then dissipates. The sequence ends where it began, but with burnt perforations that mimic the stars and seeds of creation at the beginning of the work. The cycle begins once more.

One of the most stirring elements of Australia Phoenix is a hand which appears in three guises throughout and personifies creation, desecration and healing.

Beyond its apocalyptic undercurrent, Australia Phoenix acknowledges loss and grief on a human scale. In the wake of Black Saturday, the images address fear and sorrow, whilst seeking to absolve the very heart of nature.

                                                                                                    Marita Smith

[1] Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks, New World Library, 2003, p. 85

In Autumn 2008, Susan Purdy embarked on a body of work that examined one aspect of her local environment: the impact of human intervention on a delicate eco-system. The lost forest comprised 72 photograms of ghostly white images on flat black paper. It journeyed through a fertile land, from dense pre-colonial rainforest to cleared barren plains peppered with power plants that breach the skyline at every turn. The work was exhibited at Latrobe Regional Gallery in Gippsland in August 2008. In March 2009, the lost forest was shown for the second time at  Gallerysmith in inner-city Melbourne. In the wake of Black Saturday, the lost forest took on an almost prophetic significance. The contextual shift between the two showings gave it renewed potency, with one reading of the narrative revealing a charred landscape awaiting a tenuous and uncertain renewal.

                                                                                                       Marita Smith

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Catalogue Essay by Carolyn Leach-Paholski

Gippsland Primitive

Some art directs itself at the intelligent eye, the eye obedient to its education. It turns its images towards the cerebral faculties, focusing its intention as light might be directed through a lens. It is purposeful rather than intuitive and in so defining itself misses the mark.

Purdy’s work, however, assails the heart.

It might be misleading to describe her work as sombre, yet the images have a serious beauty. Her lost forest reassembles a notion of paradise – a self-sustaining garden exquisite in its every architectural detail. This may be the way God sees the world - at once primitive and perfect- an omnipresence which registers in a blink both the treetops and a populous understorey. The fiddleheads of ferns uncoil; birds lift off; beetles jaw their way through tremulous suspensions of leaves. There is a sense that this is how the world begins - in an infinite, teeming possibility.

Yet absence has great presence in Purdy’s work.

The lost forest is composed in a minor key. Harmonics tremble along cobwebs; frogs in their ecstatic ambulation provide the grace notes. There is a sonorous upwelling of orchestration from the forest itself, from the black butts, mountain ash, the tea-tree. It is a powerful music. Before we are even aware of the cross cut saw its threat is felt. No need for danger music. It is the predatory archetype – all teeth and size. Our terror is in its efficiency, in its ability for complete erasure.

Purdy’s forest is a celebration of small things. There is a fit, a mesh in this finely crafted world. Huntsmen sit astride their orbs[1] tracking the moon, moths visit pollen gardens, leaves spin in puddles. It is all too easy to see the upset go unheeded. The untimbering ofhills, the underfoot soft sod heeled hard by cattle. Yet there is the sense that at the very brink of being snuffed out, a rudimentary forest is remaking itself from an unconscious inheritance, a memory stored like wintering sap in the trunk of a tree. Perhaps from the spores of ferns, the tenuous mycelia of mushrooms… The danger may be that it is a metaphorical remaking, that this infallibility is illusory. Purdy illustrates this deftly. Manmade objects appear gross in their manufacture beside the natural ones. Crochet contrasts crudely with delicate spore prints, the every uprightness of the bottle empire belching smoke, suggests a passage from the populous and kaleidoscopic to the linear, the rigid and rough hewn. The diaphanous atmosphere of the early prints is thickened and charged. There is intersection in all aspects of Purdy’s forest and only separation after the saw.

Purdy’s prints are painterly, artisanal – there is virtuosity in her handling of light.

The photogram is a primitive photograph related to the xray and like the xray there is the notion of the opaque laid bare. The edges of solid objects printed this way appear to take polish like old stones. Beetles in the lost forest seem to throw off light like scarabs. Some leaves read as transparencies. There is the feeling that one might be able to the see juices spin inside a living thing.

Purdy brings to the form an exquisite sensibility. She has unfailing compositional astuteness. There is a meditative quality to the arrangement and yet this quality does not preclude high excitement. Pasture grasses in the lost forest seem electric, seem to suggest sparks flying; the wing beats of birds palpable seen as from below – the landing gear not fully retracted. Similarly the display feathers of lyrebirds – tops only seem to be sighted as though in movement through forest screening.

The treatment of scale is expertly handled. The grouping of similar objects of different sizes contributes to the feeling of first hand witness - of bringing subjects close to the eye for examination. The iconic outer feather of the lyrebird is used in composition with one of the inner more loosely barbed feathers and the effect is at once of magnification. This is what the eye wants. Large separate tines of ferns rest beside dainty fronds- elucidating and delighting. Greenhoods appear with all their parts – the fragile testicular bulb intact. There is perhaps a taxonomic reference here too, a botanic sensibility for the lost forest itself is a complex taxonomy, an inventory, an assembling of the evidence.

[1] In discussion with the artist later I find that the orbs represent the concentric growth rings in newly cut timber– the huntsmen sitting atop logs as course they do, flattening themselves against the bark adroitly at any hint of interference.

'A collection of images combining oriental botanical specimens with elements collected from diverse sources, to tell stories about culture in which plants form the central motif.’

Through employment of the early European technique of the photogram, this body of work  proposes a dialogue with traditional Chinese painting and has resulted in a resonant  inversion of the ‘black mark on white silk’ that characterizes Chinese calligraphic scrolls. This reversal of tones both acknowledges the polarization of East and West and constructs a new place for them to meet.

As an investigation of rich symbolic meanings and attributions through an archive of Asian botany,  New Branches on an Old Tree is the result of a unique collaboration between artist Susan Purdy and Terry Smyth, the curator of plants in the Southern Chinese Collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne. The project  makes clear connections between Chinese and Australian cultures by directing our attention to the values and  ideals  plants have acquired over many centuries of Oriental appreciation.

The project was structured on a seasonal basis over twelve months during which Susan made monthly visits to the Royal Botanic Garden Melbourne. The result is New Branches on an Old Tree, a collection of thirty-six beautiful images (three plants per month over the year of the project), exploring a botanical collection through contemporary art.

New Branches on an Old Tree was launched at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne in 2004 and  toured to 3 national venues throughout 2004 - 2005. The project was published as a limited edition Artist Book in 2006.  The State Library of Victoria acquired it for their Artist Books Collection, as has the  Lewis Collection of Asian Art in Chicago. In April 2006 a selection of images was exhibited in Hong Kong at Amelia Johnson Contemporary.

The exhibition attracted $15,000 of Arts Victoria Funding. 

Tamara Saulwick ~ SEDDON Archives Big West Festival 2011

'All Things Pass' Exhibition at Orson & Blake, Sydney with Sculptor Emma Davies  2004

'Into the Shadows' 4 page spread for SESAME MAGAZINE Issue 2 2004  

Susan Purdy and Rosalind Atkins 'DRIFT' for the Impact 8 Printmaking Conference in Glasgow 2013 

'Phytophobia australis'  with Caroline Durre published in Antennae Magazine ISSUE 18 AUTUMN 2011

CD Covers for Between Two Moments 2001 and All The Gravitation of Silence 2004  - Peter Knight Quartet 

www.peterknightmusic.com

Sit with me in the darkness, and watch. In the flickering firelight, a shadow puppet play conjures visual illusion in the telling of a story. Various elements are arranged and theatrically animated by the puppeteer. Simple black and white silhouettes suggest space and three dimensionality.

So it is with photograms. The screen – the paper – becomes a model for space; forms and shapes spring into this void, constellating an image that is grounded in the plane. The images exist as a bridge between the worlds of matter and spirit.

Each photogram is unique, lacking the kind of mass reproducibility of conventional photography. These images are crafted in the darkroom, one at a time: each is ‘one of a kind’. As the hardness of, say, a casuarina seed touches the soft emulsion, at this precise moment of exposure, everything is fused. One kind of energy is contained, and another version of reality is unveiled.

The creative challenge is in how to animate the individual parts. It is physical work, placing an exact arrangement of objects; it’s about time, and the inter-relationship created by the proximity of things. Light burns. The terrain of the paper is marked. The grace of plants and other natural elements – even in stillness – is utilised in a process often quite spontaneous and playful. And there is always a wild or mysterious element involved: “The process can never be completely planned or controlled…. (the works) are the product of constructive planning and chance.”1

The alchemy of silver salts follows, fixing the shadow in time. A paradox lives at the heart of the medium.‘In a reversal process the photographic paper becomes dark when exposed to light; thus black is a product of light.’2