In the moment an intimate experience is riveting and visceral. But over time, that sense of presence gradually fades. Was that even real? Was he there… was she? On a recent trip to Vancouver Island, Eric Donovan took a series of photographs of himself and a friend attempting to capture and communicate his experience of the transitory nature of experience.

Eric Donovan is an internationally renowned expert on Earth’s aurora. His research focuses on something profoundly beautiful, and over the years Eric has developed a keen interest in how art and science relate. In 2020 he gave a Nickle at Noon talk entitled The Artist’s Statement of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. As an emerging artist, Eric’s practice involves photography and the manipulation of digital images, with a theme of love, longing, loss, and analogues of intimacy he stumbles upon in nature.

Instagram: @eric.donovan

edonovan@ucalgary.ca

In Conversation: Eric Donovan and Twinkle Banerjee

Most keenly felt when it is about love, the experience of loss touches all lives, and more importantly, all good lives lived. And much of the time it makes no sense. Why does living well bring with it ache? With these images, Twinkle Banerjee and Eric Donovan accept loss and longing as a central theme of life, the cost of what is most precious about life. Passion and beauty make way first to uncertainty and doubt, and ultimately to a deep sense that something was here, and now is gone.