Interferences

Sarah Meyohas Studio has created the most technically sophisticated and largest holographic works in the history of the medium. This is a technology that is completely analogue and completely archival. In hundreds of years, the holograms could be taken out, illuminated at the right angle, to recreate light waves in exactly the same way.

What is a hologram?

"To the physicist, a hologram is a record of the interaction of two mutually coherent light beams, in the form of a microscopic pattern of interference fringes. To the well-informed lay person, it is a photographic film or plate that has been exposed to laser light and processed so that when illuminated appropriately it produces a three-dimensional image. To the less well informed it is just some kind of three-dimensional photograph. Certainly, both photography and holography make use of photographic film or plates, but that's about all they have in common. The image is produced in a totally different way: you can't even describe the way the two types of image are formed in the same terms. You can show how a camera lens produces an optical image using a simple ray diagram and basic geometry; but to explain a holographic image you have to invoke the concepts of diffraction and interference, and these are wave phenomena."

—Graham Saxby

In 2021 Meyohas initiated a series of traditional holograms titled Interferences. The subject matter of the holograms is simply plant matter; yet, these are highly textural close-ups that invoke sensations of viscera. Meyohas is investigating the phenomenology of sensory perception that is unique to each individual viewer depending on what they bring to the experience and their physical movements in real space and time—a journey that begins visually and subtly evolves into an embodied multi- sensory experience of orifices, spikes, and gelatinous textures.

Holographic experimentation began in the 1940s and the technique was recognised as a unique invention in 1971 when the Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. A hologram is essentially a photograph of an interference pattern (that is, the pattern that results from the superimposition of two waves), which, when suitably illuminated, produces a three-dimensional image. Meyohas sees her holograms as lenses through which nature is glimpsed at. Glass is an ancient material that is ubiquitous in our contemporary technologies and the built environment. In these holograms, glass returns to us embodying interference patterns.