Portal to Yourself, 2023

Inkjet prints, chicken wire, papier-mâché, acrylic paint, acrylic varnish

Newsletter #29 / Seamus Platt x /squared

Includes iPhone photo essay, playlist, inspiration and documentation of process

images courtesy of pps / FORA & Seamus Platt

This is the first time I have struggled to write this text. There is something about photography that freezes my brain, seizes my body into a technical scare. Most work I look at, I do not have the wherewithal to make. Puffed up, looming, heavy with others, this lack does not stop me pulling a story from it.

With photographs, on the other hand, I am possessed by the terror of the amateur. Like having a stumbling grasp on a foreign language, I know enough to know the width and breadth of the yawning chasm of what I do not know. Unlike an atmosphere of blessed practical ignorance that I charge with the navigation of prior crit-nauts (irritating sailors in the practice sea), viewing a photograph stumps me. As a film school dropout sent running by the urgency of TV show camera operation, I find safety in responses that require naught but brain as hardware. I am scared of looking like I do not know what is going on.

Even as an adept practitioner, Seamus Platt is acutely aware of the heavy technical backdrop of photography. For the sake of his relationship to practice, he ups the tactility of production, crafting an underlying topography of papier-mâché that bubbles and swells his prints and frames them with roiling whitewash. In his personal attempts to detach from the machine-led processes of his medium, he introduces the softened edges of domestic materials that immediately warm the relationship between object and viewer. Recall: pasta frames in kindergarten, or DIY pawprints framing a family dog.

These four prints do not hold dangerous content, what links them is gentle suspense. We have: the viewing of hidden prints, a closed window, a submerged body, an empty clearing in the grass— the importance of these images lies in the seconds following their capture, the teetering potential for something to go wrong, the potential for something to go right. Picked as important, and then dressed and presented in their cartoonish garb, we could almost be looking at the birds-eye-view of a series of niche wedding cakes. Creamy with paper, already pockmarked with their young age, these cakes are not destined to last; rather than celebrating the immortalisation of a fleeting moment, Platt is holding a match to the marketed eternal memory and exposing it as ultimately compostable.

The tension of the images relieved by the whipped creamery of their setting, the four panes present us with a window within a window, a spiralling of liminal space. Within these anticipatory images is the potential for a portal, viewing deck, or threshold. In each we are on some veranda, looking out to look in, in each there is a chance that someone is looking back at us; the title suggests who this might be. This reciprocal gaze is consistently warped— a figure might open their eyes and stare through chlorine, the glaze of the glass will manipulate our shape, the stripes of grass will fragment our bodies. Only the head of the hands might see us clearly, but they are rapt in recollection for now. It is in this image that we are given some concept of time and further narrative absent in its friends. For though each image might depict a portal or threshold, there are but three that possess an ‘active’ mode that crackles with the sense of what will come next. The first image’s threshold tackles temporality differently. The folder for these prints is aged, and we wonder— are we returning to, or else discovering, something in the past? The photograph becomes evidential proof of potential disaster, CSI: Miami-style; humdrum day, laundry room-style; most divine day in the world, swimming-style.

Platt’s wider interest in post-truth and manipulation of the representational tropes of narrative and documentary photography invites us to play with these stories, while simultaneously encouraging an appreciation of photographic manipulation. In keeping with the energy of its title, Portal to Yourself will give as much to you as you are willing to give to it.

Words by Eva Phillips