I draw on black paper with white chalk. The finished artwork, however, is a negative of this drawing. Every work you’ve encountered in this portfolio has a shadow twin only known to me. I like that notion because it reminds me of “the double,” an idea found in most European folklore. The double is a shadow or alter ego, capable of leaving the body. It was by no means expected to be an exact mirror image of the person but their “anti-form,” whatever that implies; it could even take on a monstrous appearance. Meeting your double was considered to be an omen of death and we can imagine why. A confrontation like this separates the sense of the imago from its embodiment, shattering our most precious illusion: how we define ourselves.
To define is to limit, to limit is to control. We cannot control, we can only distinct between knowing and mystery. Distinction is easier when you can see but true understanding comes from spending time in the darkness. It is our double, the otherness in our own soul, that feels comfortable here. Even if our “day-person” gets more comfortable spending time with their double exploring the hidden world where it lives, the double will always be one step ahead. Luring us further and further into the unknown. There is no end to the fear only a point where the darkness is absolute. At this point the extremity cannot but collapse under its own passivity, becoming an active force. We are now standing before another presence that has a deep significance in my work: The Black Sun. This alchemical symbol represents not the absence of light waiting to be undone by the sunrise but a black blacker than black. The light that does not pull but pushes. It is disintegration and digestion. That side of nature that exists regardless of human approval.
The sun we know well is the principle of visible identity. It governs the faculty that seeks to name things, to bring them into a clear and stable orientation. When you observe that its counterpart is not an absence but a body with its own volume, the secure sense of a singular centre falls apart. This awareness shifts participation in life from a project of self-management to a study of force; the current that initiates movement before any form is confirmed. A raw necessity of expression that does not ask for permission. The figure of the witch is the voice of this position. A witch, as seen in most folk belief, is not simply a human with magical powers but the one who fully identifies themselves with their double and it’s fluxional nature. By surrendering their solar anchor they gain the ability to move with this black light. Making them able to travel into the underworld and back. No wonder that the witch has often been seen as something entirely “other.” Something supernatural capable of assuming the human form.
It is the movement between these two extremes that makes movement between all oppositions possible. These relationships are not built through understanding or worship of the Black Sun but through walking the path toward it and in the moment of confrontation resisting the urge to dissolve into despair, embracing the idea of being consumed by the irresolvable paradox instead. This is the true power of the devil: as long as one forgets or ignores that this force sets everything in motion one remains caught in its grip. The magical powers that witches receive from the devil are not whispered instructions only conveyed in exchange of the soul but the sovereign understanding that one’s attachment to the reality of light is itself a constraint, mirrored by the refusal to face nature’s destructive force.
I allow the light of the black sun to bleed into my work a bit just as the full moon makes dreams more vivid by allowing some sunlight into the night. And just as the passage of night into day blurs the lines of appearance and certainty, so does my process bring about a twilight state between the two bodies I have described. It is the zone where the law of visible identity and the law of autonomous shadow meet and distort one another. In ordinary twilight forms simply dissolve due to a lack of light. In my twilight—this Midnight Photosynthesis—the image emerges from an excess of presence on both sides. The white chalk trace of the “day-self” is forced to assume its anti-form after the inversion. This is not a passive dimming of light. It is the twilight of transition itself; the moment in which the form I have drawn with my hand is claimed by the logic of black light, which is a paradox in itself and thus only accessible by means of illusion.
The eye is the primary architect of the linear, material world. It organizes space according to the logic of the Sun. However when you fix your gaze long enough on a candle flame per example, you force a visual pause by exhausting your receptors. A space the brain would normally fill with familiar concepts generated by full spectrum sight. If this automatic completion fails and the external falls away, the rational grip slips. In that rupture, perception gains the opportunity to turn back toward its inner source. What you then see is no longer a reflection of the external world, but an apparition emerging from the twilight of the psyche itself. A literal casting of the inner shadow. By digitally inverting my drawings and sending the image trough the worlds of both pigments and pixels, I´ve encountered unexpected phenomena to show up in my work as well in other realms of my experience.
My art practise is about breaking the conditions of sight and perception. Presenting a material threshold where the fixed world and the untamed force of the black root are held in permanent tension. In a world that demands definition, my work aims to be a presence capable of holding the tension between opposites. Creating balance at a higher level of complexity. To encounter these images is not to observe a finished state but to stand at the very point of inversion where the artist’s trace is claimed by the underworld and the eye is forced to see by the light of its own shadow.
- Claudia Lindhout 2026