2022, linocut relief on 300gsm Hahnemühle

51 cm x 72 cm

Image courtesy of the artist

Interference of Perception: Rhopography (Lamp), is one of six in my series of prints investigating material culture and the body’s relationships to mass-produced objects. The lamp is a selected object that has significance in a majority of our lives, but isn’t often appreciated or thought of as having major importance. This act of curiosity is conveyed in the term rhopography. Defined by Charles Sterling in 1981, rhopography is the depiction of things lacking in importance and generally disregarded. Being interested in easily identifiable objects, I continue to assess the unassuming material base of life that ‘importance’ constantly overlooks. Instead of receding into the overlooked, the lamp projects into the visual field, appearing radically conscious. The horizontally-lined bitmap, intricately carved at seven lines per centimetre, generates an unstable zone of perception without making the image completely illegible.

Freyja Fristad is a proud Wiradjuri artist who lives and creates work across Dharawal and Gadigal land. The finely carved, meticulous works are made through the process of linoleum relief printing, as a result of her ongoing investigation into bitmaps and its relations to image construction and perception. Combining the compositional features of Dutch still-life painting from the Baroque era with a horizontally-lined bitmap, Freyja’s prints display moments of interfered observation.