ARTIST BIO
FLORA DEBECHI
Interdisciplinary artist from the Scottish Borders living and working in Glasgow. Working with light and carbon has made my work photographic, in the most basic sense. Exploring crossovers between early photographic printing, drawing, and mark making with fire, the pieces re-use the material to new ends. Carbon is one of the few elements known since antiquity, and it’s ubiquity in our technology, environment and our own bodies makes it fascinating. The allotropes of carbon- graphite, diamond and charcoal- have a tactile and imaginative potential which has become a central inspiration for my work. Both light and carbon are regarded for their purifying qualities, but paradoxically provide a black deposit, which we perceive as impure. It is this ‘black deposit’ which has been the inspiration for recent pieces drawing on the uses of carbon in science and early sound recordings in soot. Charcoal is a complex, intriguing substance, through burning in a suppressed manner the wood is distilled and reborn into a new fuel. Through releasing potential, a higher potential is created. What begins as a heavy load of logs emerges light and pure black. This transformative process makes it a unique and pure form of natural carbon.
