In her works, Sophy Rickett explores ways of seeing and questions the possibilities of perceiving and understanding the world around us. She conducts her visual research in landscape pictures that are pared down to the bare minimum, in colours that are predominantly dark and light, with forms reduced to foreground and background, featuring lone motifs such as a road, a meadow, trees and sky. In transforming landscape into abstraction and artificiality, Sophy Rickett’s works read like lessons in looking.

A road veers slightly towards the right, in the dark. Headlights pierce the gloom, slicing brightly through the night. To the left is a grassy slope, to the right the central road markings, flanking our gaze and centering it. A figure looms before our eyes in the twilight. We are in the midst of things, looking along the path of the beam in Joyrider 1 and 2. The perspective this forms is absolute in its self-containment: a destination in sight, an object within our gaze, ahead of us, in the line of flight. In the first picture, a man standing upright dressed in shirt and shorts appears at the head of the beam of light. In the second picture there is a kneeling woman dressed only in a denim jacket, her lower body naked. The forward thrust of the viewpoint encroaches on these figures, confronting their world, disturbing them in their vulnerability. We are onlookers caught up in what is happening, and at the same time we are perpetrators.

This contrasts strongly with the Untitled Landscapes of 1997 and 1998. In these, the beam of light crosses the path of our gaze at a ninety-degree angle, sweeping over the grass. Trees are brightly lit at the end of the beam, wrenched out of the darkness in almost theatrical illumination. We stand in the shadows and watch. We are not involved, but are detached observers. The situation comes to a head. In some of the pictures we see only a keen shard of light, long and slender, slashing through the black of night parallel to the panoramic layout of the image. This knife of light cuts through the night, lending form and substance to the monochrome areas and giving them a horizon. A flash of light in the penumbral void creates order: top, bottom, left, right. But the picture is too abstract, almost like a cut-out, for us to recognise foreground and background. In some of the pictures, a figure appears in the beam of light. The light strikes the figure with a dazzling harshness that seems to tear it out of the night. In the darkness, we watch things unfold on the stage before us. Since the arousal of emotion is avoided, the term “voyeurism” does not apply. Instead, the situation is more one of seeing and thinking.

The Untitled Landscapes of 1999 break away from the strictly parallel composition of picture plane and visual signs. A view from above onto an illuminated road barrier and its diagonal line from centre left to top right lends dynamism to the areas steeped in nocturnal gloom. The barrier creates a sense of space in the blackness, and the figure leaning on it suggests some vestige of narrative. The figure leaning over the rail appears to be looking down: into the night, down the slope, into the abyss. But the setting is reduced to the point of mere lines. Light shines down from the top right, lifting the barrier and the figure out of the darkness, and yet, at the same time, blending out all detail. What remains is minimally evocative – the fact, for instance, that the figure is standing at the very point where the rhythm of the barrier changes, where the posts seems to be more closely spaced as through framing the figure. This one image with the figure influences the way we perceive the others, which have no figures in them: railings in the night, diagonal lines, lit from the right. We look up from below, far from what is happening. Then, one single image turns the whole situation around: we are looking down from above onto a stick – an illuminated white cane for the blind. Like the barrier described above, it is also rhythmically divided. And it seems like a railing, like a mobility aid in the dark of night.

The works discussed so far appear model-like. Radically reduced, sharp and concise. Sophy Rickett seems to be doing some kind of fundamental research here, as though presenting us with a visual grammar of seeing and perceiving the world. Who is active? Who is watching? Where does the light come from? What viewpoint does it create? What is the slant of the report? What network of coordinates is created in the picture? At first, Sophy Rickett restricts herself to spatial aspects; later, temporal elements begin to play a role. Narrative, emotional components are increasingly eradicated. Her first well-known work – her graduation work for the Royal College of Art in London showing a series of women dressed like young executives in tailored jackets, miniskirts and heels, pissing upright in public places – was very different indeed. Almost the opposite. These were visible images that referred directly to the underlying social context, in which the elements were not only self-descriptive but also freighted with connotations. Joyrider 1 and 2 still contain some such references. The very title points to young people who steal a car and race it through the night, for kicks, for the sheer thrill of it, leaving it torched or abandoned next morning. The person appearing in the beam of light becomes the catalyst that charges the image with meaning and content. The night-time street scene becomes a setting. Three years later, in Untitled Composition, 1999, Sophy Rickett’s work has been pared down still further and stripped of references. Nocturnal darkness, a spotlit scene: a generator drives the spotlight mounted on a tripod which, in turn, illuminates the generator from above. Like a cat chasing its own tail. It is a reference to the biased “self” of seeing, an almost programmatic reference by this artist indicating that she wants to explore the system of seeing as such and convey its conditionality and limitations. In future, instead of doing so in series of individual works, she will do so in more complex sequences of three and four groups of images.

The first sequence of three images is Forest 1-3, created in 2000. These are still individual images, linked by different views of the same forest. In a kind of cinematic pan, Sophy Rickett takes in the forest, mid-grey, parallel trunks against a dark ground. The photographs are like grisailles, frescoes of mid-grey on dark-grey, or, to put it in more contemporary terms, like X-rays. We see neither the treetops nor the roots; the trees are cropped on both sides. The angle of view is flexible; it shifts, rolling past the trees. Or, rather, the tree trunks are spread out before us like letters on a scroll.

In Cypress Screen, 2001, a three-part work linked to form a panorama, a row of cypress trees divides the landscape into foreground and background. Like a curtain, a screen, a switched-off monitor, the night-black trees conceal whatever might be happening behind them in the light. We are separated from this possible occurrence, from this light, standing on the shadowy side of the scene, in the murk of conjecture. In Playing Fields, 2001, the scenery runs across four pictures: from the overlapping football goalposts that peel out of the deep and unstructured darkness, white and geometric, towards the black treetops through which a strong light shines. The sequence of four photographs suggests a panorama. But it is a “false” panorama, a construct: the angle barely changes from picture to picture, as though we were sitting on a camera chair that is moving in a line, turning only slightly. The image thus created unfurls like a wave rising menacingly before our eyes. A pitch without a game, its white goalposts empty. The game is being played elsewhere, over there, beyond the curtain of trees, in the bright glare of the light. A game? A lit street? A theatre auditorium?

Visible and invisible, what is seen and what is sensed. The foreground is dark, the background illuminated but invisible. We are cut off from the world by a curtain of trees, separated from this other place whose light attracts us to it like moths to a candle. The works London Studio 1 and 2 epitomise this research model. A dark, rectangular room is cut off from the rest of the room by curtains. From outside, light seeps through cracks in the floor, the ceiling and corners of the constructed room. Studio 1 with an upward view, Studio 2 with a downward view. These are simple changes of perspective that visualise the movements of seeing and the vantage point from which things are seen. The works of Sophy Rickett bring to mind Plato’s cave, in which the captive people can perceive only the shadows of what is happening outside, but not “the thing itself”. Plato uses this metaphor in his Politeia to describe his notion of the higher reality of ideality. Displaced to a lower level of reality, this metaphor often serves as the basis for epistemological theories and questions about the way we gain our knowledge of the world through our sensory perception of the appearance of things in the world. Rickett’s works trigger a kind of “visual game”. In concealing the source of the light, they visualise the conditionality of our seeing by drawing the curtains. We do not know where we stand, what we are looking at, or where the light is coming from, and we feel trapped: Sophy Ricket does not allow us to stand outside the situation and evaluate or classify it at a distance. She withholds the light of knowledge.

In the theatrical, night-green, four-part work Via di Bravetta Part I we find ourselves in one of the strangest, most unfathomable situations. This time, we are on the other side of the curtain, not in the darkness, but on the side where the light is shining. We are looking at the curtain of trees, which runs from lower left to upper right in an unbroken panoramic form over the course of four photographs, culminating in an electricity pylon. In this rhythmic image, the play of light and shadow in the world blends behind us, behind our backs, in the natural freedom of the cypress curtain. The situation seems to mock our ability to recognise, while at the same time the sumptuous composition, the almost sensual vitality of the curtain of trees seems to seek reconciliation with our own limitations. It is as though this “Italian stage set” were trying to tell us that the constraints of life, of existence and of knowledge are evident and that they are similar throughout the world. But here we have learned to love these limitations and to cherish them as part of ourselves.

Finally, we look at the works Poplar Plantation 1-3 (2001), A Dead Tree (2003) and Twelve Trees, M40 (2004). The three diptychs Poplar Plantation 1-3 are in colour, apart from a few early exceptions. But the light is lurid, the glow of streetlamps, of artificial light spilling onto a meadow, on which a sapling, a lone young poplar – we are tempted to refer to it anthropomorphically as “lonely” – is framed by a wooden structure intended to support the young tree and protect it. The diptychs are structured so that the two images together describe a visual space, but one of the images is always empty, while the other has a tree. These are stark, exposed situations, photographed in winter when there are no leaves. The chill, the emptiness, the remoteness, are almost tangible. A Dead Tree is a single image in a long horizontal format, like a predella, in which a small tree, little bigger than a branch, stretches from left to right. The branch or the tip of the tree is so thin that it has been given a wooden rod for support – clearly in vain. The title of the work tells us unequivocally, just as the angle at which the little sapling tilts in all its barren nakedness shows us, that the tree is dead. As in Poplar Plantation, this little tree, too, appears in a wan light against the infinite darkness of night. The Twelve Trees, with the additional reference to the M40 in the title indicating that it has been planted near a motorway, fare little better. They seem frail and weak. And yet some of the trees are thriving, even in this patch of land reserved for them within the road network where their radiant beauty is wasted. This series of photographs of trees has an air of portraiture. The trees can be read as representatives – of the individual, of the nature of life. Unlike earlier pictures that address the spatial conditionality of seeing, what is important here is time and the temporality of existence. We see young saplings growing or dying, or dead. We see young saplings whose crutches – these supporting structures – remind us of nurture and of isolation. They have been planted and nourished and yet they have been abandoned. These works leave the realms of pure knowledge and are immersed in existentiality. They are pared-down and austere, but they touch us emotionally, generating a constant, chilly frisson. Only the thriving trees by the motorway bear a germ of hope, a glimmer of radiance. In the midst of calculated planning, a tentative individuality emerges.

Sophy Rickett’s works centre on the possibilities of perception (the multiplicity of viewpoints that plume across the space like a vapour trail) and on the possibility of shaping the world. Gloomily crepuscular colours hold sway over tiny strips of light, over the evocation of light as knowledge, spreading darkness before our eyes like a louring metaphysical cosmos. Knowledege, her pictures tell us, is difficult to gain; it evades us and is always merely the tip of an iceberg. The world and the viewpoint of the spectator are in flux – all the rest is (Platonic) shadow. Existence takes on traumatic dimensions in her pictures. Expelled from the greater context of values and cast into this world, the trees stand alone like Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, separated from any other world.