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In the series Space Craft, Kate Joyce arranges and photographs anamorphic wedge prisms and isosceles and equilateral triangle prisms of various dimensions during different times of day and weather conditions. Joyce divorces the prisms from the world of color and from their original optical design intent, focusing on their unique reflective and refractive properties, to construct spaces both familiar and mysterious.

Notes on Space, Craft, and Prisms

Craft n. “power, physical strength, might”
Craft is labor and a skill.
A vessel is also a craft.
A craftsperson hones space out of matter in order to carry bodies, objects and the imagination through space.

Space is the possibility of movement. Light travels as wave and particle. The body travels with locomotion and the senses. Light and the body share this dual nature in forms of travel. Vision is a form of traveling through space. The camera and the photograph are vessel-crafts that carry the eye and the mind. In the fields of engineering, physics and science fiction space-crafts carry the mind, body and imagination toward the unknown, the unidentifiable, and first encounters. Space Craft is engaged in planar disorientation. 

Prisms are shapes. The word prism comes from the Greek, prisma “a geometrical prism, trilateral column” (Euclid), “something sawed (as a block of wood), sawdust,” from prizein, priein “to saw”. Prisms are not space, bu they are used to create space through architecture. A wedge, a brick, a keystone, a tile—these are all prisms. Space Craft imagines an architecture that plays mischief with gravity and boundaries. Is there a connection between the etymology of prism (to saw) and saw, the past tense of the English word see?

Prisms are precision crafted for use in ophthalmology, microscopy, astronomy. They are used widely in telescopes, binoculars, submarine periscopes, and prescription lenses. During several Apollo lunar missions, prisms were used to calculate the distance between the moon and earth. Prisms are powerful tools. Even so, we see incorrectly (just as we hear incorrectly). Something is mistaken for something else, and more often than we might ever realize. In English, the words “in” and “out” describe focus. These are spatial words. Space Craft is interested in activating sensations and visual adjusments caused by the high contrast between what is in and what is out of focus.

 Download Information Sheet (Information, Kate Joyce, Space Craft, 2024.pdf)

Space Craft
Archival pigment print
40 x 26.5 inches
101.6 x 67.31 cm
Framed: 41 x 27.5 x 2 inches
104.14 x 69.85 x 5.08 cm
Edition of 3
Signed and dated verso

*Variable sizes available upon request