Like the Baroque artists before him, in his Mirror studies, Peter Cripps transforms the mirror from a simple object into a theatrical and philosophical tool – one that invites the viewer to question both their own perspective and the very act of seeing. Baroque artists used mirrors in innovative ways, reflecting the era’s fascination with vision, illusion and the nature of truth. Unlike earlier periods, where mirrors might appear in an artwork as symbols of vanity or moral contemplation, Baroque painters used them to complicate spatial depth, dissolve boundaries between the real and the represented, and actively involve the viewer in the image. Baroque artist Diego Velázquez broke new ground with his famed painting Las Meninas 1656, for using mirrors to draw the viewer into the scene and make them aware of their own act of looking, creating a dynamic tension between illusion and reality.

Cripps’s mirror installations also explore the interplay between object and subject, engaging the viewer in a sensory relationship to the artwork and the surrounding environment. Mirror studies require the viewer to put themselves in front of a mirror to see all its elements, but in their act of looking, they become part of the work. Inspired by Charles Howard Hinton’s 1906 book The Fourth Dimension, Cripps also uses mirrors to, as the artist has put it, ‘punch’ a hole through the floor, creating a space above and below that enables the copper forms on the wall to slide down into another realm. In collapsing the idea of the representational frame, Cripps employs a Baroque perspective – one that delights in strange angles and reinforces that perhaps we only see partial glimpses of the world.