Daniel Bracken - It’s Safe Behind the Glass

It’s Safe Behind the Glass is a working title, taken from an enclosure sign at the London Zoo. Forming an illustration of time loss, the photographs conceptualise a gap between the perceived and physical – brushing against fleeting moments within the domestic and the natural worlds. The images string together a narrative that alters our perceptions on looking. Much like spectres of memory, they slip into and out of sequence, showing an affected familiar moment; a nod towards the Uncanny. The photographs become timeless and frozen. Drawn from personal dreams and memories: archives, manuscripts, and novels become the main inspirations for delineating images. Referencing Virginia Woolf’s narrative techniques, the photographs drift past autobiography - out of their timelines, out of their environments; and become familiar moments that have been forever changed. It is these gaps where the body finds its weightlessness. Abysses of anonymity, of time loss. A shift out of space – out of time. The images further contrast meticulous human intervention through evidence of craft and labour. The natural world becomes changed, almost forced to stop. Time that has been lost, trapped in the instant, but mostly forgotten in these spaces. Abandoned. The defiled grave, the decrepit rituals. Research into Victor Turner’s Liminal and Liminoid become important: these ritualistic moments between “being” and “becoming”. Perhaps this is where the photographs sit: as the Double within nature, a mirror to time. The viewer is forced to look between the perceived and the photographic.