Chemical Wedding – Image, matter and the (un)making of synthetic white PhD Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Art 2020-2024 (published 2025)
This research project traces a white substance, titanium dioxide, transversally (Guattari, 1989) across extractivism, chemistry, alchemy and image-making. The pigment, also known as TiO2, is often referred to as the ‘whitest’ and most ‘total’ white. I argue that it has been central to a Western visual regime from the twentieth century to the present, sustained by a paradox in which chromatic whiteness appears both empty and highly charged.
Building on this research, and drawing on methods and conceptual possibilities that emerge from art making, I propose the methods of sludging and shifting, together with the concept of the homeorhetic, as ways of critically intervening in this visual regime. Through this case study, the project more broadly reimagines the relationship between image, matter and synthetic materials.
The thesis makes unexpected connections across diverse phenomena, including Nicole Kidman’s and Angelina Jolie’s so-called ‘photo flashback’ malfunctions, the figure of the Pierrot clown, John Dee’s stolen black Aztec mirror, an open-pit mine in western Norway, a pigment factory divided into a white and a black wing, and the now-demolished proto-modernist site of London’s White City.
The thesis also engages with the work of Lutz Bacher and Diane Severin Nguyen, structural and neo-structural film, Robert Wilson’s Deafman Glance (1981), and Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953).
