Using multiple views of single sights in India, reconstructed and woven together in a painterly fashion - Catherine Jansen's new Intimate Immensities series evokes not merely the appearance of a place but her experience of it and the extraordinary plenitude of emotion that each place aroused in her. Employing digital technology, her method is to move through a space recording multiple close views. She has an excellent eye for detail. By seamlessly "stitching" the images together she constructs a capacious image that could not be seen from one vantage point.
The finished work is panoramic, with a flow movement through the space, in and out, creating a strong balance of interiority and outer expanse, of intense light and enveloping darkness, the massive and the delicate, the minute and the monumental. In the melding of many small moments in time there is a spacious sense of timelessness.
The images not only evoke the artist's experience in a particularly compelling space, but derive their power in part from the discovery of what compelled her, a discovery made in the act of reconstruction of the quantity of raw material gathered in her detailed exploration of each place. The viewer is invited in to what becomes, through this process, a contemplative experience of deepened perception.
Digital art has its own language. The use of digital photography and the reconstruction of images, according to Jansen, requires a fluency in the language until it becomes intuitive, as it is for her after seven years working exclusively in the medium. The process of combining the images in Photoshop is intricate and time consuming, she describes it as " a surrendered sort of process, like weaving". The series represents half a dozen trips to India. The images are drawn from the remote places encompassing the country: from the northernmost point of the Himalayas, Kardarnath, where the streams gather to become the Ganges, going south to Rajasthan, and as far as the holy city of Tiervenamalaya: from the Agra in the east through to central Kajuraho, site of the ancient abandoned temples, to Varanasi in the west.
The finished panoramic images are digitally printed by the artist on archival paper with archival inks. The small prints are 18" x 45" made on an Epson 4000. The larges images are 24" x 98", made on an Epson 7600.