On Blurring Text written by Sue Rainsford
Aperture: an opening which allows for the passage of light. As it widens and narrows inside a camera lens or human eye, rays scatter thin as mist or gather thickly in a luminous cone.
Expansion, recession. In the movement between them, blinking discrepancies take hold. Blurrings occur.
Diana Copperwhite’s paintings make a kind of feast of these blurrings.
The paintings’ kinetics make them seem, at a first glance, transitional: what they catch is the shift from one state to another. Invisible toward visible, emergent toward dispersal.
It’s perhaps truer to say these opposing forces are enmeshed and entwined. What we see in the moment between rigid and yielding, between murky and pellucid, has become a thing in itself.
This vagueness, this confusion, this blurring; it has resolved into painterly swathes and daubs and is very much of the world. As such, as much as these works are subject to the rules of paint, they also feel beholden to the raindrops that loosen the oily film of the street—the iridescence that thereafter lines the soles of your walking feet.
Even when an aperture is firmly closed, elsewhere—the light itself endures.
When an aperture is not only closing, but vanishing; the terms by which we’ve previously perceived light are altering.
A vanished aperture: an unmediated flow.
A partial torso, a curve of cheekbone—pulsing, neon strobes.
A pair of eyes—streak of rainbow.
