Pong Field, 2006 by Jessica Eaton

Jessica Eaton

Website: www.jessicaeaton.com

Artist Statement:
My photographic practice is experimental. I draw inspiration for projects from many places, but more common than not there is a referent to photography itself within the works or the processes. I spend a good deal of time thinking about what photography is and let that dialogue lead me to ideas of what it could be. Light, contingency, relativity, time and spatial relations have come to the forefront as subjects in much of my work. I plan my projects extensively, but treat them as experiments, a neverending series of tests. Each time I shoot, the results influence the next step. I often like to leave a lot of space for accidents to happen and am most satisfied with the work when it takes on a life of its own. I want to make photographs that surprise myself, that teach me something, that seem a little like I didn't even make them despite the effort. I want to make photographs that compel one to keep looking. This work was constructed in camera onto one piece of film. Pong Field is an outtake from a series where I dropped 512 ping pong balls from a ledge in studio—each sheet of film received additional exposures exponentially, double and half.

Bio:
Jessica Eaton is an artist currently living in Toronto. Born in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1977, she spent her childhood engrossed in competitive gymnastics, followed by trouble-making.

After giving up on high school, she eventually moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she first picked up a camera. It was love-at-first-developer-bath, and she was taken on by Spotty Dog, a B&W professional lab, where she did custom printing in exchange for after-hours darkroom experimentation and lessons by the lab's technician, Mark. In 2000, she was accepted into the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. In 2002, she took a one-year break to work in post-production for film and television, after which she returned to Emily Carr to earn a BFA in photography in 2006.

Her work has been exhibited in galleries and artist-run centers across Canada, including the LES Gallery, Helen Pitt Gallery, Access Gallery, Blanket Gallery, Paul Petro Projects and Hunter and Cook HQ, as well as featured on numerous photography blogs. Her photography can also been seen in a number of art publications, including Pyramid Power, Patti, The Vancouver Review and Hunter and Cook.