Flatland
By  Dr. Leah Kelly


Every visual encounter is an illusion. Past experiences convince us to see what isn’t there. If we were faithful to our retinas, we would see the world with two black dots where receptors give way to fibre.  Instead we ignore these blind spots.1  We fill in the blank. We are filing in all the time. We fill in borders and shape and integrate contours. If part of an object is partially occluded we imagine what is hidden. If part of a form is missing, we complete it. We resolve ambiguity with what we think should be there2  Neuroscience confirms what Gestalt psychologists thought: we see the whole not the parts.3 The brain requires no information to fill in, only lack. Much of what we call seeing is filling in what we have not seen at all.


Peter Coffin’s silhouettes take this unconscious act and make it conscious. They force us to watch ourselves hallucinate.  The contours are there, the edges are real and yet, we are forced to realize we see so much more than is before our eyes.  And this is precisely what Coffin wants: for us to stop and be aware of the meaning we impose on form. We know what these shapes are but how? Why and from where? Where are they placed in our mind? Under which category? How do these shapes, their memories and meanings relate to each other? What is the minimum information required to represent an idea? What does it feel like to complete an idea without all the information? Coffin says “I am interested in how we decide something is significant and the process itself.”


For the retina, the world is all contrast and edges.  The center-surround organization of retinal ganglion cells which receive all visual information, means contrast counts: brightness produces a stronger response when it is surrounded by darkness and vice versa.  Similarly, a small dark spot generates a stronger response than uniform blackness.4 Silhouettes exploit this. Their outline, or bounding contours are their only information but this is the type of stimuli to which we are most sensitive. It is minimal but it is all we need. Contours and edges are how we primarily see the world.5 They are enough for us to perceive what is figure and what is ground just as we can decipher a complex scene from a simple line drawing.6  Perception relies not only on detection of shape and form but on comparison to all previous experience. We are constantly asking ourselves “what does this particular smattering of photons against my retina remind me of? Where have I encountered this before?”7 Coffin says he “chose forms from different eras, some hardly considered sculpture in their time, some forms that are culturally significant or iconic, some anyone will recognize and some that, at a minimum are recognizably derived from three-dimensional form even if unfamiliar and unidentifiable.”


Object recognition relies on the activation of an entire hierarchy of neurons, a miniscule proportion of which is responding to light. The rest are dedicated to recognition, allocating categories and subcategories to objects, 8 If every visual memory is represented in the brain through a specific pattern of neuronal activity, one could imagine that such activity evoked from seeing an image for the first time and recalling it from memory might not be so physiologically different. The silhouettes prompt recognition and we fill in the rest. No matter how close we get to them, they remain flat.  Features never emerge in the world but they do in our minds. We imagine the presence of invisible parts. Edwin Abbot’s Flatland is narrated by a square living in a two- dimensional reality. He is unable to perceive dimensions beyond his own. The square is visited by a sphere and taken to Spaceland. Upon his return to Flatland he tries to convince his fellow flatlanders that there is more to life than meets the eye. Seeing Coffin’s sculptures, we feel like the Square once he has encountered Spaceland.  Even though he can not directly perceive Spaceland in Flatland or Lineland, he knows Spaceland is there. We cannot unsee the original sculpture if we are reminded of it.  We exist in space and so we project our memories of it onto the Flatland that Coffin (and our retinas) creates. “”Either this is madness or it is Hell.``' 'It is neither,” calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, “it is knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eyes once again and try to look steadily”.10


Coffin is interested in what he calls “spatialized thought”. But all thought, conscious or not is spatialized. Our brain is full of maps. The visual, auditory, somatosensory and motor cortices are all topographically arranged such that particular frequencies, retinal input and body parts are represented in discrete stereotypical spatial areas [of the brain].11 We contain place cells, neurons that become excited when we are at a particular location in our external environment and grid cells, neurons that activate in a hexagonal lattice pattern according to the physical space we inhabit.10 Walking around the silhouettes is like being able to walk behind the wall of the cave. It creates the sense that we may be walking around that place in our own minds where the vague memories of those shapes reside - a form of externalised thought. Coffin says,” Surrealist painters liked to depict expanses of space, with or without a horizon, in which they rendered representations of things that stood in for ideas and emotions, often subconscious ones. The aim was to explore the ideas and emotions represented in these spaces from a kind of objective point of view. They saw these as renderings of spaces of the mind that allowed them and people experiencing their images, an opportunity to step out of ordinary perspective and into an imagined one where we might consider how we think and as if ideas interact in space.”


Perhaps it is no coincidence, or more accurately enitirely coincidence that the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped area of the brain, that is the locus of our spatial information, is also the region most associated with forming memories.11 The hippocampus not only encodes our understanding of physical space but also builds abstract cognitive maps of associations between novel objects and experiences.12 Coffin’s Sculptures once again remind us of what had been understood since the time of Simonides, been described by Giordano Bruno and illustrated by Proust: time, place and memory are the coordinates of our being.13,14  Exhibited together the silhouettes create a world of juxtapositions.  Decades and context collide forming novel constellations of memory and association. While walking amongst them it is impossible not to assign the sculptures meaning and narrative. In the 1940s Psychologists Heider and Simmel made a short animation of geometric shapes and asked people to describe what was happening in the film. The results showed that we project causality, personality, and motivation onto animated squares, circles and triangles.15 Just as we project a three-dimensional structure onto the two-dimensional pattern our retina receives in order to make sense of the world, we project a social structure attributing animacy and causality onto blank objects. This social topography is also thought to be represented in the hippocampus.16  Amongst the sculptures, we find ourselves in a three-dimensional Heider-Simmel illusion, where a change in perspective or perceived movement may lead to alternative narratives. Familiar classical forms may react in astonishment or bewilderment to find themselves next to a modern form or some other unrecognizable figure. You could imagine one saying to the other “I expected you to be taller” or “we’ve met before in that textbook”.


Silhouettes in nature, only exist at a distance. Walk towards them and they dissolve into light. The objects that created them grow, revealing features to be detected.  Surface and structure emerge. Walk towards Peter Coffin’s silhouettes and they don’t disappear. They are lit from above. The sun migrates across them throughout the day, lending them cyclical shadows of their own. These solids invite you up close. Walk around them near and far and their two dimensions slip in and out of view. Their permanence and your motility mean you observe yourself observing, navigate your thoughts as much as the space of the exhibition. The shapes resist dissolution, only into blackness, and even as night falls, you know they still exist, just as memories do when you close your eyes.




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