Light and memory

Drawing of the Ca' d'Oro from memory, placed inside a camera obscura, on location, with the light of reality projected over the drawing. Photographed digitally.

Memory has long been the driver in my drawing practice, but it has repeatedly produced the same roadblock: how can the difference between what is remembered, what is seen, and what is physically present be drawn? Sketches made from memory offered an intuitive starting point, yet comparing them to measurable reality proved analytically unproductive. When I attempted to use architectural drawing conventions to contrast a remembered sketch with the actual proportions of the thing recalled, the drawings clarified that a difference existed but not why. No systemic cause or principle emerged—only a mismatch between an evocative mental image and the measured facts of a scene. Analytical drawings, with their dependence on fixed systems of measurement, are effective at distinguishing objective conditions; they are far less suited to visualizing the fluid and unstable character of recall. They can map difference within comparable realities, but they cannot register the distance between memory and perception.

The core difficulty is that remembered images and drawn representations do not stand in the same ontological category. They cannot be directly compared because they operate in different mediums of cognition. Following Aristotle’s account, I treat memory as “a present image of a past object of experience”—a mental act rooted in the present rather than a trace stored in an object. Drawings, photographs, and notes may aid recall, but they are not externalizations of memory itself; they are mnemonic devices, not equivalents. Any attempt to compare a projective representation to a remembered image therefore begins at a structural mismatch. It was this mismatch that forced me to look for another way of letting memory and perception meet within a single image.

In my project Light and Memory, I stopped trying to compare memory and reality at the level of measurement and instead looked for a way to let the media themselves articulate their differences. I constructed a small camera obscura that projected a real-time image of a location directly onto a graphite sketch made from memory of that same place. The projected image—real, present, and optically precise—landed on the remembered image, which was provisional and incomplete. Their difference appeared not through measurement but through the interaction of two media types that normally anchor opposite ends of a continuum: the sketch as an evocative prompt and the representation as an optical effect.

While the project displaced measurement from the visible surface of the work, it did not eliminate it. Instead, the measuring system rotated out of the picture plane and into the geometry of the camera obscura itself. Because I was documenting the projection with a digital camera embedded inside the camera obscura, the setup had to accommodate two distinct projection paths: first, from the obscura’s lens to the drawing, and second, from the drawing to the digital camera’s lens. Positioning the drawing required negotiating between these two projection paths. This negotiation introduced a slight skew in the picture plane, which produced a corresponding set of distortions. In addition to this primary constraint, the camera obscura’s focal length, the multiplication and inversion inherent to its projection path, and the physical displacement between the device and the viewed location all demanded measured drawing to understand and correct. The camera became a tool that revealed how a system of measurement can operate orthogonally to the image rather than across it. The final images obscure their own technical underpinnings, but the process of making them hinged on this reorientation of analytical drawing.

This shift reframed my understanding of the picture plane itself. The camera obscura’s distortions—displacements, compressions, and optical shears—made it necessary to fold and cut the drawing surface rather than treat it as a stable substrate for the image. Instead of treating these manipulations as errors, I used them to test how distortions could become a form of analytical information. In this way, Light and Memory revealed that analytical drawing does not require its measuring system to be visible within the image; it only requires a relationship between the system and the image, even if displaced, hidden, or orthogonal.

Light and Memory ultimately clarified several aspects of my ongoing practice: the functional distinctions between sketches, drawings, and representations; the role of media exchange in making visual difference legible; and the productive potential of displacing a measuring system away from the surface of the image. More importantly, the project reframed the picture plane as a negotiated space—one shaped by competing projective geometries rather than a neutral support. The cuts and folds required to reconcile memory, projection, and documentation revealed that distortions can function as analytical information and that precision can operate structurally rather than representationally. This shift opens a new direction for my work: one in which the construction of an image becomes inseparable from the spatial conditions required for it to appear, and where the difference between memory and perception is not merely measured but staged, engineered, and made visible through the very apparatus that produces the image.