Mirror, mirrorRosslynd Piggott and Rudi Williams 
InterviewExhibited works

Interview:
Rosslynd Piggott and Rudi Williams 
In conversation with Sue Cramer


Melbourne, July 2024 

Mirrors



      • [Sue cramer]
 I’m curious about mirrors—looking glasses—a perennial theme in art. What significance do mirrors have for each of you as a theme? Are there instances of mirrors in art from the past or present that are important to you?

  • [Rosslynd Piggott]
I’ve had a long fascination with unclear mirrors, historical mirrors that have lost their clear reflective qualities due to the oxidation process of the silver nitrate used to make the mirror surface. There is a very beautiful one in the National Gallery of Victoria collection that I remember seeing when I was quite young. It’s one of those objects that makes you draw breath, like a kind of shock encounter. (It is likely that some of these early mirrors are no longer displayed due to mercury content and the possibility of leaking vapours). Such encounters with certain objects, artworks, or places—whether built or natural—can resonate for a long time and then do tend to emerge as major influences on my thinking and making. 
  • During my trips to Venice, I have seen many hauntingly beautiful, darkened mirrors in palazzi and museums. They are like silent witnesses, absorbing and reflecting time and events, laden with memories and visions of time, their mercurial surfaces sometimes peeling off. Such mirrors carry both light and weight; they are no longer shiny surfaces in which to check one’s visage before public appearance. They have already captured vanities, secrets, fears, aging, and countless scenarios—the mundane, the dramatic, and those deemed important. They are weighted with these events, becoming like vessels holding time, characterized by a deafening silence.
  • Joseph Brodsky in Watermark: A Love Letter to Venice (1989), wrote exquisitely about his haunting encounters with dark mirrors in palazzi, their unreachable and ghostly qualities. The non-reflective round mirror has also been a non-deified and central image in the Shinto temple in Japan, signifying time, endlessness, and voids, emblematic of vibrational energy that connects all life.



Rosslynd Piggott, mirror reflection, Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice, 2019.


  • [RUDI WILLIAMS]
I like how mirrors take what is reflected out its original context, creating absurdity through re-framing, a little like a photograph. When a mirror or reflection is imaged in a photograph, an effect of mise en abyme can occur—like a picture within a picture, a doubling or self-replication—which can evoke interesting questions of space and time. The way mirrors are used in cinema to confuse the viewer or create symbolism is interesting to me, especially; Agnes Varda’s The Beaches of Agnes (2008), Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).



A still from The Beaches of Agnes, Agnes Varda, 2008