To measure a space?
For his unfinished opera the CIVIL war$ theatre artist Robert Wilson drew on the expression “A tree is best measured when it is down” as a subtitle. An elegiac turn of phrase, sourced from a biography of Abraham Lincoln, it insinuates there are many measures to be made. When a tree is felled the measurer can go about assessing what was once something but has become something else and will keep becoming until spent. Another measure is the space once held by the tree. Is it possible to measure that absence?
In mathematical measure theory a measure space is a measurable space equipped with a measure. Gottfried Leibniz’s original integral notation has a certain elegance:
∫ᵃᵇ f(x) dx
Closely related is the concept of a topological space, which seeks to formalise the idea of space as a set of points that are connected in a continuous manner. I reference these theories to distinguish approaches to not just measuring but also the abstraction of the term itself. It becomes a word of many points.
Photographs become. They create spaces, but do not cut down or sever the continuity of space. The process of photography flattens and reduces space. Looking at a photo recovers that space. We recognise spaces when the points cohere into a legible pattern. Photographs affirm those spaces because we connect the sets of points in a continuous manner. Those patterns are ours but can be anyone’s. We take them with us.
Opening event: Thursday 20 November, 6–8pm
Image: The measure of spaces #3 (2025), archival pigment on cotton paper, 22.5 × 30 cm
