This exhibition invites the viewer into what Ponch Hawkes calls the ‘realm of glimpsing’.
The term ‘glimpse’, originally derived from the word ‘glimmer’, refers to visual information that is fleeting and superficial, like a shimmer of light reflecting off a moving surface. To glimpse something is to catch a partial view or passing impression in a world where nothing stands still. Ponch Hawkes has drawn on memories of these uncanny apparitions to compose a series of photographs that celebrates the mystery of life and looking.
Odd scenarios emerge from the night; a woman abandons a baby as she rushes through a train station, a man skips rope in a drive-through bottle shop, a couple perform ballroom dancing in a deserted arcade. These scenarios beg for a before and after – a narrative that would explain why they came about and how they subsequently unfolded; however, Ponch Hawkes is more interested in savouring the ambiguity.
In restaging these scenes, Ponch Hawkes has avoided making them appear like gritty documentary images, hastily snapped by a street photographer. Instead, she has composed them as poignant tableaus that float outside the time of our daily routine. Sometimes she even allows supernatural figures to lurk in the shadows, setting the glimpse adrift in the timeless darkness of dreams and myth.
In their ambiguity, these images resist the proposition that a photograph provides proof; in turn, they offer enigmatic glimpses that excite the imagination.
