Teressa Danielle Phillips seeks to extract the beauty and uniqueness of commonplace things and scenes through her photographic images. Education in engineering and fine art allows her to tap into both the logical and intuitive parts of her brain. The problem solving necessary as an engineer lends itself to the conceiving of art. Science, mathematics, visual art, music, and language all contain a lyrical nature or flow that she seeks to find and convey through her work. A well worked equation, a meaningful poem, and a salient image can all elicit the same sense of emotion for her.
She began her interest in photography as a means to illustrate necessary steps in processes, research problems, and classify information. This use of photography in engineering extended to utilizing the camera to express herself visually. Photography combines technical skill along with discriminating visual configuration. The work of a photographer necessitates an ability to be present in the moment. Each image captured is exactly that, a moment: a point in time and space the artist has halted for all to see. It can never be recreated, it is forever frozen for contemplation. The equilibrium of form, light, and emotion of the image must come entirely from the elements captured. Taking the time to explore these moments, as they are presented by the artist, can be meditative for the viewer. The balance required to compose an image that elevates the commonplace to something worthy of exploration is a skill requiring the brain to process utilizing both types of functionality.
Teressa works in digital, 35mm film, and 6X7-120 film formats. The processes involved with each medium influences the type of work she produces. The physical craft of processing film and making prints involves a tactile sense to create physical objects utilizing physical objects. Digital photography allows for a merging of technology and art allowing her a level of control unattainable through film.
Her film work is all black and white (B&W) allowing her to personally develop the film and create silver gelatin prints commanding the whole creative process start to finish. For her B&W work, regardless of format, she is concerned with the interplay of light and the distinctiveness of shadows creating a gothic impression. She looks to 20th century artists Imogen Cunningham, Minor White, Edward Weston, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard and contemporary artists Diane Kirkland, Chris Clor, Mark Ruwedel, and Chuck Kimmerle with their mastery of form and light for the best expression of the image. The Zen and Straight photography movements, with extensive detail and concern with form, influence her use of traditional film materials and methods. The Romantic and Gothic art and literature movements shape her general aesthetic.
Her color work is digital in format with images ranging from subtle photos taken at dawn to the riot of color of an iridescent bird in bright light. B&W photography can often set a specific mood, but color images can influence emotion through color as well as light and shadow. One of her favorite images is a Muscovy Duck with its bright red head underwater as it was bathing creating an abstract that is still recognizable as a duck.
Just as process influences the final outcome of Teressa’s art, so does subject. Her most recent body of work, Threshold, is a collection of photographs that explores transitions within the landscape. In the southern landscape, these lines are often at the edge of civilization. This project is the result of her traveling 1000 miles within 100 miles of her home in Columbus, Georgia using her Fuji GW670II medium format rangefinder camera. These landscapes are familiar to her as she spent her adolescence in rural Alabama viewing the changes from her home on a farm to small towns and cities. As an adult she has continued to live in the south in small towns and larger cites. She still finds a connection to the land that surrounds her. Taking the time to capture and examine these views provides us with an opportunity to understand the world we create just by living our lives.
Other projects have included nature and wildlife in public access areas such as local and state parks, national wildlife refuges, and national forests. Typical nature photography often mimics human portraiture with perfectly posed animals and tact sharp eyes and faces. Teressa’s nature work seeks to appreciate the awkward and unusual, often catching birds with wings stuck in the air or thinking of spiders as abstract shapes.
The sublime nature of the commonplace is allowed to show through Teressa’s photographic vision as the beauty and uniqueness of a scene is brought forth utilizing logic and intuition. The captured images regard shape and shadow as a poetic rhythm for the visual sense to be explored by entering the world through her perception. Each picture brings a moment forward to be considered by the viewer in response to this balance of elements.