Mysterious and compelling, the portfolio of artist Kirsteen Titchener focuses on the human condition. See more of her work by visiting her website.
“Let It Go” photography printed on Hahnemuhle Photorag 308gsm, sizes vary
I am a self-taught photographic artist living in the UK. I am drawn to creating images that are usually impossible to capture in our everyday world, and yet remain somehow believable. The majority of my work is made up from a large number of different shots combined using many hours of digital editing to create the final piece.
“Missing: Spellbound”, photography printed on Hahnemuhle Photorag 308gsm, sizes vary
I started exploring Adobe Photoshop alongside my explorations into photography about 10 years ago. I became instantly hooked by the opportunities it offered, as I cannot draw or paint. I find the process of layering and blending photographs together endlessly fascinating, as well as being quite a therapeutic process. I love watching a new image evolve through this process. I can happily become lost in an edit for days at a time.
“Missing: Autumn”, photography printed on Hahnemuhle Photorag 308gsm, sizes vary.
The motivation for my images is ever-changing. Some are spur-of-the-moment creations inspired by a flick through my stock images and noticing a combination that works together in my mind’s eye. Others are inspired by folktales from the region where I live, sometimes a season or an event. My background as a psychologist also contributes strongly with many finished images focusing on the fragility of the human condition and emotions.
“Hourglass Within” photography printed on Hahnemuhle Photorag 308gsm, sizes vary.
I am currently developing a series of self-portraits that lack “the self” in a recognizable form. The self is then replaced by something representing an element of a person or life such as autumn leaves. Sometimes they are left without a recognizable form at all. To me, this represents the feeling of being in a crowded room, but not being seen or heard.
The artist, Kirsteen Titchener
I particularly enjoy self-portraiture because it enables me to create a piece without assistance or direct input from others. This allows me to become completely immersed in the creation of an image from beginning to end.
“The Grip” photography printed on Hahnemuhle Photorag 308gsm, sizes vary.
All the images that go into a composite piece are ones that I have photographed myself. I have an extensive library of stock images that I continually work to top up. Sometimes I’ll photograph something because I need it for particular image. Other times, I’ll photograph an object because I think it might come in useful one day. Sometimes it’ll be several years before that happens, and I still have many photos waiting their turn.
“Missing: Silenced” photography printed on Hahnemuhle Photorag 308gsm, sizes vary.
Some of my key goals are to encourage people to stop and look twice at photography as art and to consider what an image means to them and how it resonates.
Kirsteen Titchener invites you to follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
Marvelous.
Dear Kirsteen,
We met briefly at Goodwood recently and I admired your work, likely, too effulgently; describing it as ‘ethereal’; ‘transcendental’, ‘mystical’, well beyond Freud’s ‘uncanny’, and bordering on the ‘metaphysical’, even ‘sacred’ or ‘sacradotal’. In effect, I think I said that your images are what a good philosopher does; inform people) how to go beyond’ what words often can’t do — save, that is, words such as one finds in e. e. cummings poetry, where ‘luminous tendrils of celestial wishes’ combine well with ‘dreamslender exquisite white firstful flames’ in not a dissimilar way to what I would not describe as the ‘sublation’ you achieve in your images; a word which has a fine philosophical tradition, especially in the German tongue.
I was wrong with Freud and Umlichkeit, which means ‘comfort’. This is precisely the opposite of what are doing. It is more Aufheben, ‘annulment’, ‘projection’, ‘aspiration’, ‘yearning’. You might like a philsopher’s, Walter Kaufmann’s, description of ‘sublation’ in commenting on Nietzsche’s notion of ‘self-overcoming’; which is much subtler than mere projection’. He unpacks it this way; ‘sublation’ is ‘a simultaneous breaking-down and redirection of the energetic life-forces’.
In a sense, I sense that is what you are doing with your ‘uncanny images’.
Anyone aware of Freud’s unconscious use of ‘sublimation’, essentially as physical (or sexual) overcoming, senses how much better ‘sublation’ is in the way you and Nietzsche display it, sans flesh or corporeality.
Enough philosophy.
In case you had a similar experience to my daughter Colleen (Conti), who also exhibited at Goodwood’s at the same time, and didn’t even come near recouping the costs involved, I wanted to — for what’s it’s worth, hopefully a bit. psychologically – to encourage you since, as with her, I sense, the sophistication of your images is likely beyond the depth or the insights of the majority of folk. Or quite possibly.
I hope coming all that way from Devon was at a not at a financial ‘loss’.
I therefore sincerely hope I am flat wrong and your work was recognized as rewarded accordingly, with sales.
I personally have to apologize; being so ‘enraptured’ by what I saw I never even looked, for a moment, the prices you were asking. I intended to find my Son, himself a stained-glass artist, to return to your stall, but he ‘wearied in well-doing’, so we left without wishing you well, tangibly or otherwise. I notice I can’t find prices on your website either.
In sum, I work is ‘extra-ordinary’ in the best mystical senses. As a former American, one might say I was ‘blown-away’ by it, which is precisely how, in a sense, you ‘dematerialzed’ the images to make them so ‘evanescent’. It was only after I looked at your ‘card’ at home that I realized they were (likely) portraits of you, minus the ‘body’, but ‘pro’ the spirit of ‘etherality’; a word, ‘ether’, which cosmo-physicists before Einstein used to try and capture the ‘air’ or ‘atmosphere’ conducive to life-emerging on our planet.
Enough associations, for your own fertile mind?
i hope this gets to you and you appreciate the depths of my own enthusiasm.
Charles Conti
Dear Charles,
Thankyou so much for your kind comments. I remember our conversation well and it has given me a great deal to reflect on and plenty of inspiration. Kind regards Kirsteen