Tina Gonsalves: unleashing emotion

The beauty within. The English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins coined terms such as inscape and instress in the late 19th Century to capture the coherent inner wholeness or essence of a thing, whether it is a person, a tree or his favourite topic, nature. For Hopkins the world radiated its inner wonder through its external appearances. I'm not so sure about that anymore. In an age of digital simulation, reality is now codified as image, not reflected through its images. The once reliable equation of surface equals depth has abstracted into the deceptive algebra of CGI, the hyperreal, the simulacrum. But I'm especially dubious of the wisdom of this historical axiom, the beauty within, in the light of the ongoing work of media artist Tina Gonsalves. For the past decade Gonsalves has been wrestling with appearances, experimenting in a startling body of visual, interactive and time-based works with the aesthetic dilemma of expressing inner states, or, as she describes it, 'externalising the internal'.