Behind My Eyelids I Saw Red is a new body of work and collaboration between writer and photographer Zara Gudnason and painter Claudia Phillips. Through an exploration of mining sites in the Latrobe Valley, the artists conceptualise ‘the glimpse’ as a way of exploring the inability to fully see something which you know is in front of you. 

The ‘glimpse’ is a way of seeing that is characterised by obstruction, leading to an unknown, and evoking a feeling (desire, fear, curiosity, paranoia, etc) that opens space for the viewer to speculate: What is beyond the glimpse? Is the obstruction intentional? Who benefits (or not) from my not seeing/not knowing? 

Drawing from Jacques Derrida’s theorisation of the ‘trace’, the artists propose the ‘glimpse’ as a mode of seeing that generates the effect of presence (feeling) through an absence of fully seeing. Glimpses are temporal and referential without a fixed meaning, glimpses are fleeting, undermined by their unknowingness, connected by the feeling imbued by the viewer.