DIANE EPOFF GOODMAN
Diane Epoff Goodman, Digital map of the Paphos Theatre 2007.
Artist Statement
This work considers digital photography as an innovative tool that invokes a partnership between scientific (outer) and artistic (inner) modes of enquiry to reveal new ways of reading site, remembering place and interpreting presence.
Digital photographic processes are both systematic and fluid, facilitate play, improvisation and new ways of perceiving the world. The work explores the capacity to stitch, layer, blend, variegate, transform and recontextualise photographic images and provides new possibilities for artists to explore imagination and memory, through the merging of art and digital photographic technology.
My research focuses on the site of an ancient Greco Roman Theatre, an archaeological excavation at Paphos, Cyprus and asks: how do the processes of digital photography transform artistic practice to represent a contemporary understanding of being-in-place? By examining the digital photographs of key artists, Nancy Burson, Phillip George, Idris Khan, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, I demonstrate the innovative practice of digital photography in crossing discipline boundaries.
The process of photographic map-making was a journey of understanding the site as a ‘work-in-progress.’ Over two whole days I moved up and across the whole area of the theatre, fifty meters by eighty meters of uneven ground, taking more than two thousand photographs. I stayed aligned to the theodolite’s position held by the excavation surveyor. The map is informed by the archaeological grid of the site, and the camera frame. The mapped textures reveal multiple histories in the inner matter of the earth.