Look inside
The Black Out series explores the vast, volcanic landscape of the Sólheimajökull glacier in Iceland. The project captures a terrain where volcanic ash and ice collide, presenting a environment undergoing rapid environmental shift due to climate change.
Conceptually inspired in part by the 1965 New York power outage, Holdsworth employs a technique of double photographic inversion, transmuting positive images into negative frames. The pale daytime sky turns into a deep, cosmic black, while the basalt-black glacier ash transforms into a luminous, otherworldly white. This inversion renders the Icelandic topography as an alien, lunar landscape illuminated from within, shifting the scale and texture so that vast escarpments resemble glass or mineral formations.
By blurring the line between documentary realism, digital abstraction, and the Romantic Sublime, the series disrupts normal measures of time and perception. The absence of human figures combined with the stark, inverted tones creates a sense of quiet monumentality, confronting viewers with a changing planetary surface that feels simultaneously ancient, futuristic, and vulnerable.
The Black Out series explores the vast, volcanic landscape of the Sólheimajökull glacier in Iceland. The project captures a terrain where volcanic ash and ice collide, presenting a environment undergoing rapid environmental shift due to climate change.
Conceptually inspired in part by the 1965 New York power outage, Holdsworth employs a technique of double photographic inversion, transmuting positive images into negative frames. The pale daytime sky turns into a deep, cosmic black, while the basalt-black glacier ash transforms into a luminous, otherworldly white. This inversion renders the Icelandic topography as an alien, lunar landscape illuminated from within, shifting the scale and texture so that vast escarpments resemble glass or mineral formations.
By blurring the line between documentary realism, digital abstraction, and the Romantic Sublime, the series disrupts normal measures of time and perception. The absence of human figures combined with the stark, inverted tones creates a sense of quiet monumentality, confronting viewers with a changing planetary surface that feels simultaneously ancient, futuristic, and vulnerable.