The Great Sand Sea

The Great Sand Sea is a series of photographs taken in the Libyan Desert, near the Oasis of Siwa, on the border between Egypt and Libya. Wingfield is alive to the geographical and historical significance of this area of land. For the Ancient Egyptians, deserts were considered to be great cosmic bodies that provided a pathway to the divine. Existing at the edge of life, they were the threshold between reality and whatever lay beyond.

The Libyan Desert is known as one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, crisscrossed only by a few trade caravans and populated by a conservative Sufi Muslim tribe, the Senussi Bedouins. The hostility of the Libyan Desert has provided it with a form of protection from the corrupting forces of human history. It was largely unexplored until the twentieth century, too arid even for the nineteenth-century Orientalists. The English and Hungarian explorers Ralph Bagnold and Laszlo Almasy travelled there in the twentieth century in search of the lost mythical city of Zerzura, with Bagnold writing Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World in 1935. But, other than that, the Libyan Desert has been left relatively unpolluted by human fantasy.

This is what Wingfield captures: the absolute purity of the space; its complete stainlessness. Far from painting a "Dead World," she presents a landscape that is so alive that one is compelled to draw breath. The desert is physically empty but visually full. Patterns, lines, curves, and crevasses come alive depending on the light, which Wingfield follows compulsively. She sees the way it surfs the dunes, outlining the crests and scouring the folds. Much of Wingfield's oeuvre is inspired by the Irish poet John O'Donohue's description of light as "the great priestess of the landscape." She says, "Light illuminates all things eventually, even in the darkest spots. It has a transformative power. Under its spell, the desert is in constant change." The emptiness conveyed in The Great Sand offers a new kind of fullness. In this open space, Wingfield guides viewers towards a place of mental clarity and radiant stillness.

What draws Wingfield to deserts is not their aesthetic value, but rather the state of mind that they induce. Confronted by such vastness, such interminable space, it is impossible not to step into a more expansive mode of thinking. Wingfield notes the important difference between "loneliness" and "solitude." As the philosopher Paul Tillich wrote, the former describes "the pain of being alone," while the latter captures "the glory of being alone." Wingfield's photographs fall firmly into the second category. They express the glory of solitude. Such a celebration has perhaps never been more important in an age suffering from what has been called "a loneliness epidemic." In Wingfield's photographs, there is space - physically and more importantly, mentally - for being. She says, "Our imagination can be released in this harsh landscape, whose shifts encourage internal changes in our own soul."