LARGE CIRCLES 1992

2, 10"x8'
Reflection holograms

This piece is made up of two one-step reflection shadowgrams. The 'camera' which was used for the holograms was devised by Mike Medora and I learnt of it at a talk that he gave to the Royal Photographic Society Holography Group in April 1991.

I started experimenting with this camera at the end of my first year at the Royal College of Art and built up a controllable range of colours using progressive amounts of triethanolamine, a chemical which swells the emulsion on holographic plates. At the same time I used basic forms, the circle, the square and the triangle, as subjects for holograms.

There are three pieces that relate to the same theme as this one. The first, a four by five inch hologram, shows the space of one circle echoed by another in the pseudoscopic (a negative space). In the following two larger pieces (of which this is one), one holographic plate additionally echoes the other.

The colours in this hologram are intended to be strident and to seek to balance some perceptions of the circle such as those of Kandinsky who viewed it as "the cosmic, absorbing, feminine, soft form".

The space occupied by the circles is paradoxical as the depths of the circles appear to rise out of the plates and there is no definable place for them to meet.

It is hoped that there is a sense of mystery attached to the piece, not simply just as an optical illusion, but in a way that one can look at shapes and colours - react to them and not immediately wish to find a scientific explanation to the process of their emanation.

Martin Wall 1999