The Making of Dark Matter
I recently updated my Dark Matter series to feature a new set of images. This project has been in consideration for a long time in one form or another until a couple years ago when I created the first set of images. This iteration expands on the previous version and goes into more detail.
This project was fun to photograph because it involved so much experimentation. The iron filings behave in such peculiar ways when exposed to the ceramic magnet’s magnetic field. With time I could predict how they would react and manipulate them to create shapes and forms I thought were interesting, including the twisting bodies between the magnets.
I felt it was crucial to photograph this series with a medium format camera system considering how intricate the “sculptures” are since they are made from very small iron filings. The images have to be viewed exceptionally large in order to be fully appreciated, which is a difficult thing to do online. In the gallery I’ve included 100% crops of the full images to show the detail of the patterns and forms the filings and magnetic field create that are lost when viewed in a fitted version.
The series is titled Dark Matter since it was inspired by the scientific concept of the same name. Dark matter is completely invisible and does not interact with the electromagnetic spectrum, yet its influence is seen at the scale of galaxies and galaxy clusters. Boiled down, the idea is that judging from the amount of observable matter in a spinning galaxy, the galaxy should fling apart into space since there isn’t enough matter or gravity to keep it from doing so, therefore there must be some form of additional matter that can’t be observed that keeps things in check.
Similar to dark matter’s invisible yet profound impact on galactic structures, the invisible magnetic field generated by the ceramic magnets have a profound effect on the iron filings that, as they interact with it, reveal its shape. The series presents an imagined interaction of dark matter with normal matter from a higher dimension, or bulk, in which both the dark and normal matter are visible.
