Vessels in progress 1

Vessels in progress 1

Vessels in progress 2

Work in progress on Vessels/ bottles project. This is a piece of work I am making for The Gallery of Wonder galleryofwonder at Newcastle University. It will be on exhibition in July/August. I haven't had much time to give it since our MA induction at Barnsley apart from thinking about it alot, but I have managed to pick up a couple more interesting old bottles in passing - I will need 30/40 - I have just a few, but need to get the principle of how the thing works right before I replicate it. It has already moved on from perspex blocks, my initial idea - way too expensive to get what I need.

The practical/resourceful solution - bottles, I like more and more. I like everything it brings in to the piece - the ideas of different varieties of the same  - very like people. the container of the soul, looking out, looking in. Of course, I have to make the concept obvious and impactful enough so that it doesn't just look like a nice interesting collection of bottles - and yet it will be that also - that I own as part of the piece - I am choosing them particularly - I take in the connotations, but above all, I hope to transform them.

I delight in making something that is difficult to photograph - elusive to capture because of reflection or optical illusion, so that even the most documentary representation becomes abstract. The bottles/vessels are tricky, although I will tackle them later with my proper camera. Somehow it blurs the edges of reality - an object that is not quite static - again for me, the quest to render one thing in terms of another - light you can touch, film as a sculpture, a living shadow.

This project is also employing my feel for substance - glass, silver, vintage, bottles, mirror - lovely real things - I'm glad it's not perspex, although plastic interest me too and I have used it before. All the time I am making this I am thinking of how I could translate it into something bigger, given the chance - using the "trick" of the floating image to make a large-scale perspex column in a large gallery setting.

Vessels
 

A quest for moving image in new forms such as frozen film in a sculpture, or a static moment... This is a suspended secret portrait in a vessel, incorporating the viewer's reflection along with the image. A reinvention of anamorphic secret portraits, especially of Bonnie Prince Charlie in Highland museums, where the true image is revealed in a splodge of paint through the correct placing of a reflective cylinder.  Currently using vintage bottles, milk, whiskey, unknown, jars, etc - may use plainer contemporary ones - whichever I choose has connotations, so will incorporate that - currently leaning towards vintage with loaded meanings. Also silver powder, aluminium leaf and silver leaf, to get exactly the right reflective qualities. These bottles will be in a window gallery on glass shelves, so also has to work at first glance. Vessels is the piece title - may have a subtitle, but using the meanings of container of spirit, ethereal and actual, a means of delivery, almost in a sense of transubstantiation. self portrait 1 The images I will take from my archive, either some anonymous Victorian portraits I have, or early family photos. self portrait 2 I thought I would add some images of previous work to give a little context to the imagery I am using. These are stills from moving image pieces. I am interested in using distorted and dismorphic images of the face - how little do we need to still read a face as a person? How much can be inferred as to inner life? Fleeting glances, abstracted reflections, which are the real versions? person 1

                                                                               

person 2

2nd March 2011