Whispers from the Starry Void

In a conversation with Nilofer Khan, Granville Carroll raises concerns about the way we perceive the world and hopes that his work will enable us to be true to ourselves.

- Nilofer Khan

When Granville Carroll was a child, he would spend hours in the woods with his siblings. Western Washington, where he was raised, offered scenic views of the mysterious night sky. Often, he would find himself wondering about the tiny dots of light hovering above him and their significance. This fascination continued well into his adulthood. In 2019, when he began working on his series titled Cosmotypes, he delved deeper into this interest. “I have been drawn to the symbolic, cosmic, and spiritual influence of circles. The Cosmotypes are made up of tiny dots of light and represent endless possibilities. They point to cycles of creation and destruction. I’m thinking about time’s endless and malleable nature. I see it as a circle, which contracts and expands as we dive into the past and project into the future,” he explains.

Success After Failures

After his first wet-plate collodion session at grad school, Carroll began to think of ways to expand his process. In 2019, his thesis titled Because the Sun Hath Looked Upon Me began to influence his photographs. For his initial Cosmotypes, a title suggested by his friend Hugo Teixeira, Carroll used projections of images from NASA’s Hubble Telescope. However, due to the heat of the room and the long exposures, the collodion dried up. “I had to figure out a way to recreate my constellations. That is how I began to create Cosmotypes. As I experimented with the process, I realised I am not interested in representing what we can already see. I want to portray the cosmos as I envisioned them. That power to create from nothingness inspired me to take the project even further,” he says.