25 MINUTES BETWEEN SUMMER-AUTUMN by Doran Edwards

25 Minutes Between Summer-Autumn

by Doran Edwards

Since I was a child, I have felt mesmerised and reassured by twilight’s corridor of deeping blues to night’s black. It’s a kind of resonance where I feel a sense of “me” merging and settling into something already-known, purely as an atmospheric quality. 

As an adult, I can use language to create a symbolic bridge between experience and reality by connecting memory to imagination. For example, I can describe that ambience as feeling like being held with all life in an ocean-like presence. Or, like all my cells dissolving into the pigment of Yves Klein’s Blue or Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel 5. But these are just words, and without that imaginary bridge, does this ambience occur ‘inside’ or ‘outside’? And what is in-between?

On October 5th 2023, I took 13 photographs in 25 minutes of twilight on Camberwell Church Street, London, using high quality, low sensitivity 35mm film. The air and colours all around had the unique and palpable glow of Summer’s end crossing-over into the beginning of Autumn... everything imbued with a kind of indescribable magic. Huge rain storms left the streets flooded as the first fallen leaves blocked the drains and that rich blue essence  doubled and danced between the rain’s mirror and the sky. And as the blues deepend, the incandescent and LED reds splased out like an electric watercolour leaving the film straining at it’s threshold to drink-in whatever drops of light it could. 

My cells, the film grain and the lights swimming in an amniotic embrace. And yet, receiving the negative scans back from the developers, the full compositions didn’t interest me in the way that this unnamable, rich and distilled ambience did...

When Chiemi invited me to take part in the Z/I/N/E exhibition, I began considering the ‘unused fragments’ aspect of the brief and returned to those 13 photographs. ‘What is the ambience in-between?’, ‘what is ’inside’ and ‘outside’?’ I questioned. Enlarging, extracting, discrading, refining and discovering new compositions between place and narrative that express that ineffible quality and dislocation. Between seasons, countries., languages, materials, textures, perspectivess... no fronts or backs, no beginning and no end, just a constant middle. But, to express the ambience in-between, it has to be known, before language, as a sympathetic resonance -not by an observer- but as a mutually arising process in a world-in-process: you know it, because you are it. 

Without place, without narrative, without words, what is the ambience in-between, and how would it feel for your ‘inside’ to swim in the amniotic ocean ‘outside’?