Vessels in Progress 5

I am giving myself more and more to do with Vessels. After hours of tussling, thinking and trying out, I do believe I have come up with a way of showing a positive and negative image at the same time. It is as yet too subtle even to photograph, and one of the images may always be subtle, a glimpse, but that is fine. I have seen it!

If I can imagine something, then I know it can be done, somehow. All I have to do it put in the thinking and effort to find the solution. I sort it out on my walks, in dreams, with stuff. The vessels piece, with its layers of reflections upon reflections, and opposites and mirror images is complicated to get to simple solutions.


Cleverness is not the goal. Perhaps especially for this project a sense of wonderment is. I think art does employ all areas of sense and sensibilities.


I am now collating and considering the images. My working prototype bottle is just one eye, and I am using a few faces to try out. Because of the limitations of the bottles, and size, and other things, a face at most will work - groups will end up too tiny. The images have got to be readable to some extent at first glance. I have been looking at faces form my photographs at home - these are from Victorian and prewar Czech school photos.

I have been intending to make some work with these for some time - some of these are the only traces from vanished lives. They will still be part of a moving image.


I am also considering eyes, but in pairs. These are mostly cropped from family photos. It's amazing how much can be read in the eyes, they stand for a shortcut to the face and to the person. And I think the activity in some, the caught moments, give even more movement and animation to the character, a moment that implies the next. 

As it stands, my choices will depend on what works well within the bottles, what can be read near and far, what most implies a face or a person or character.


I am aware of references to the work of Christian Botanski, and the altar-like installations of images of the dead.

Christian Botanski. Reserve of the Dead Swiss.

http://www.electricgallery.co.uk/uploads/images/boltanski.jpg (accessed 22nd April 2011)

Perhaps that ceremonial documentation appeals to my Catholic upbringing. If I use my vintage photographs, there are parallels in that these mementos signify what is left of a person, however I think what I am really trying to convey is the abstractness of life in any case, that we are a collection of light and energy, having an individual form and character, and that what we really are is quite different to how we seem.


22nd April 2011