Taking the concept of suggested materiality to its logical conclusion, with this work I intended to illustrate convincingly the feeling of ghostliness. Using the tree-like sculpture from work 3.4.19, I first shone LED flashlights through glass blocks to cause refracted light patterns against the tree and on the white wall behind it. The resulting images, both during the experience and in the documents, created a feeling of an intrinsic quality of the suggested tree that is not normally visible. The process was simply optical, but by manipulating light I was now intervening closely with perception.

I continued to explore this phenomenon. Setting the video camera up to record the wall, I shone light directly onto the structure and moved around the tree, creating shadows of the partial-object that changed in shape, perspective and scaled in accordance with my movements. The video recorded only the moving shadows (not the object itself). This was different from a shadow theatre technique where the light source is stationed and the performer moves, here I was moving and the tree was standing still. People who viewed the video and stills from this work found it to be aesthetically pleasing, but were also anxious when I mentioned that there was nothing in the images, that it was simply a representation of my own movement against the more slowly moving (still) tree.

I understood a partial answer to the question about digital devices and nature – that humans and their technology are moving within nature rather than against it. It also seemed that parallax motion might contribute to how we narrativize our sense of location. If a media screen presents a reality to us which is immaterial, but which we perceive to be material, the ensuing emotional response could include ghostliness and dislocation.