Isdahl, Marie-Alix. 2025. Chemical Wedding: Image, matter and the (un)making of synthetic white. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

In this research project, I rethink image-making processes through the lens of the white substance titanium dioxide. I propose that titanium dioxide is not only a chemical compound, pigment and specific hue (the so-called “whitest” or most “total” white) that often functions as a degree zero of our most common surfaces and images – a material that enables visuality itself – but, through its emergence at the onset of modernism in Northern Europe and its subsequent establishment as one of the most mainstream pigments, it has produced a visual regime that continues to permeate environments and minds today. By combining theory, ethnographic writing, and artistic practice, I engage transversally (Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 1989) with titanium dioxide across disparate domains such as extractivism, chemistry and alchemy, mass image circulation, clown and Hollywood cosmetics, the optical unconscious, and the legacies of colonial modernism.

I propose two core methods: sludging and shifting. Through sludging, I reimagine montage to explore how the white substance affects various visual registers while materially constructing white racialised subjects. When employing this method, I focus on incidents where the white pigment fails to perform as expected. With shifting, on the other hand, I study states of in-betweenness. The method emerges from image-making experiments with ilmenite – the shimmering black precursor to titanium dioxide, sourced from Norwegian mines, which holds significance as a portal to other realms. Through sludging and shifting, I seek to locate gaps in titanium dioxide’s visual regime in order to imagine it otherwise.

The study generates knowledge at the threshold between pre-verbal materiality and fully formed images, exploring the moment when an industrial substance becomes an image. In other words, I interrogate the space where perceptions are formed, and I examine how the white material within the Western context has come to operate as both empty yet highly charged, neutral yet saturated with myth. My approach draws on and extends the work of Diane Severin Nguyen and other artists who engage with material exploration to expand image-making. It also builds on the contribution of Richard Dyer (1997) and other critical whiteness scholars in attempting to render “whiteness strange”.

Finally, I present the concept of the homeorhetic – referring to processes that adapt in response to deviation and unforeseen events rather than seeking to maintain static states – to frame both the written research and practice. The study’s two components inform and evolve alongside one another, developing through moments of failure and flow to intervene in the visual regime of titanium dioxide, ultimately reimagining both the synthetic substance and image-making.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00038698
Keywords:	contemporary art, art research, critical theory, chromatic whiteness, sludging, shifting, the homeorhetic, three ecologies, Félix Guattari, moving image, visual regime, extractivism, alchemy, the optical unconscious, titanium dioxide
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Art
Date:	31 March 2025
Item ID:	38698
Date Deposited:	10 Apr 2025 15:44
Last Modified:	10 Apr 2025 15:44
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38698

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