felt presence / presence felt

In this new photographic series, Adelaide-based artist Emma Northey creates impressions of an unseen world. Using infrared film and layered images, she reveals a landscape that blends reality with imagination. Shadowy figures emerge from inky blackness, hinting at a presence hovering at the edges of perception. Northey explores a psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia. If you’ve ever stared up at the clouds and watched them morph into dragons, or turned your gaze to the full moon and discovered a face looking back at you, then you’ve experienced the effect. Pareidolia is described as the tendency to see meaningful images in random patterns, most commonly manifesting in the appearance of faces or figures that aren’t really there.

The apparitions in Northey’s photographs are inspired by anomalistic psychology, mythology and the paranormal. Dreams, too, play a part in her compositions. Hypnagogic hallucinations, often referred to as waking dreams, occur in the transitory moments between wakefulness and sleep. Highly sensory, these hallucinations usually involve seeing, hearing, or feeling something that is not actually present. But consider for a moment, when we see half-formed faces or figures in the shadows, perhaps we are sensing something that exists between realms? What if the illusions that we experience belong to an unseen reality that lies beyond the borders of our own? It may be that our minds are more receptive to these spectres as we drift into sleep, when the noise and colour of the day fades into night.

Northey’s images are an invitation to consider the idea of a felt presence. The suggestion of a figure, shrouded in mist. A collection of shapes and shadows that coalesce into faces, observing us, even as we are looking at them. An indistinct silhouette evoking the sensation that something, someone, might be there, just beyond perception.

Tai Spruyt