Chemical Wedding – Image, matter and the (un)making of synthetic white
PhD Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Art
2020-2024 (published 2025)
In this research project, I rethink image-making processes through the lens of the white substance titanium dioxide. I propose that titanium dioxide is at once a chemical substance and an idea of ‘total’ whiteness – often described as the ‘whitest’ white or an ‘opacifier’ – functioning as a degree zero of our most common surfaces and images, and as a material that enables visuality itself. Emerging at the onset of colonial modernism in Northern Europe, and becoming one of the most widely used pigments, it has produced a visual regime that continues to permeate environments and minds today.
Building on this research, I develop the methods of sludging and shifting, together with the concept of the homeorhetic, as ways of intervening in this visual regime. Through this case study, the project interrogates the threshold between pre-verbal materiality and fully formed images.
The study traces 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 with one white wing and one black wing, and the now-demolished proto-modernist site of London’s White City. It 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).
