The Glowing Void: Why 45 Years of Separation Is Not Lost Time

For over two decades, my work as an interior designer was dictated by clients, site constraints, and spatial efficiency. Quiet luxury was my language—creating environments of understated elegance, refined textures, and controlled atmosphere. Yet embarking on my MA Fine Art Digital journey at Central Saint Martins represents a shift away from client briefs to focus entirely on pure expression.

At 54, the core of my practice centers on a personal theme: reconnecting with my father. He left when I was nine years old. As a renowned photographer whose signature technique relied on in-camera movement without post-production, his presence was defined by light and time. My earliest memories are bathed in the amber glow of my childhood bedroom turned darkroom, watching images emerge from latency, and trailing him on weekend shoots in mountain fields and along sea shores.

The physical separation spans 45 years, yet my thesis premise is simple: no time has been lost.

To understand how time can remain intact despite decades of physical absence, I find the work so inspiring from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s series, Theaters.

The Compression of 170,000 Frames

In the late 1970s, Sugimoto posed a deceptively simple question: What would happen if you photographed an entire feature film in a single exposure?

To execute this, he brought a large-format camera into mid-century movie palaces and opera houses. As the film began, he opened the shutter; when the credits rolled two hours later, he closed it. Over those two hours, roughly 170,000 individual frames of motion picture passed across the screen.

The resulting photograph does not show actors, plot points, or individual scenes. Instead, the accumulation of every single frame superimposes into a pure, brilliant rectangle of white light. The movie screen becomes the sole light source in the room, casting a quiet, radiant glow over the surrounding architecture.

Emptiness as Total Presence

At first glance, Sugimoto’s glowing rectangle appears blank, as if nothing is there. But in reality, it is the exact opposite of empty: it is total presence. Every emotion, movement, shadow, and frame of the entire narrative exists simultaneously on that screen. Light added to light leaves behind pure illumination.

This distinction forms the conceptual bridge to my project.

To an outside observer, a 45-year gap between age 9 and age 54 might look like an empty screen—a span of lost years. But through Sugimoto’s lens, those 45 years are not an empty void; they are a long exposure. Every memory of my father, every lesson in light from my childhood darkroom, and every spatial project I built during my design career have accumulated into a single, continuous present. This is gonna be a thinking direction for me to further develop my project idea.

In-Camera Reunion: Translating Light to Space

Sugimoto’s process aligns directly with my father’s artistic code: no digital manipulation, no post-production shortcuts, only physical physics and shutter speed. My father captured movement by moving the camera body itself; Sugimoto captured time by keeping the shutter still while the world moved in front of it.

In my upcoming CSM installation, my initial thinking is the merging these two philosophies into a physical environment:

1. The Spatial Architecture: Drawing on 20+ years of interior design, I am structuring the gallery as an immersive, darkroom-like vessel—a room where light is held rather than displayed.
2. Layered Projection & Translucency: Initial ideas only, using sheer textiles, optical prisms, and layered footage of my father’s camera movements connecting my work, light will pass through multiple spatial planes.
3. The Continuous Present: Rather than arranging photos chronologically from age 9 to 54, the projections overlap in real time.

When a viewer walks into the space, they step inside the camera body itself. They enter a single frame where past and present collapse into one illuminated room—proving that between father and child, no time was ever lost.