emf
At the time, I was using a slide projector, torches, lenses and bits and bobs to take photographs of light. I spent about a year doing that, and have many images, some of which are currently waiting to be digitised so that I can make more use of them. This was really an aesthetic quest, like making a giant painting, and working out what should go where, issues about juxtaposition, centring, off-centring, how to maximise light and shade, placing colour, and so on. So many visual choices, all to create the images I was imagining - things without scale, form - beautiful globules of light and colour that can't quite be read.
emf
For years I had really been waiting for the opportunity to delve into this, to draw out and define what this art thing was within me, things I could see in fleeting glances.I am looking for as little as possible that says at much as possible.
emf
I have over time taken many series of such images - many hundreds. Occasionally I use them, or keep them for future use. I remember them, and how I made them. I have ideas to use this archive more. In a way the images are my visual diary or sketchbook.
emf
So back then at university, I was paring away, abstracting, removing as much as I could in order to reveal the meaning I was searching for. I was being heartily challenged by a tutor at the time. He was quite a dry old stick, and I was getting to a place with these images where I was finding it harder to put into words the nebulous ideas I was exploring. It was not a good match. In fact it was terrible.
More enlightening for me was a visit I made to a Microscience show, similar to this:
I love trade shows, the insights into another world, the equipment that sparks ideas of requisitioning to artistic use. Scientists tend also to be open minded to talking to artists and sharing enthusiasms.
At the show, of course, microscopic images abounded, and taken often by scientists with a purely scientific purpose and approach:
(http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/10/photogalleries/best-microscope-photos/)
accessed 6th March 2012
(http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/physics/news/headline_178877_en.html)
accessed 6th March 2012
The revelation of course was that the images were not dissimilar - in many ways some microscopic images had the qualities and contents I was currently exploring and creating in an artistic pursuit. All at once questions - what is the difference between what I am doing and these more mechanical images? What is art? Why don't I just get a microscope, take those images, and bung them up on the wall? If there are two similar images with similar qualities, how can I say that one has the layers of meaning I am imbuing it with, and that the other has come across them accidentally.
emf
My conclusion was that the image is not enough. It all depends on what you do with it, and as an artist, especially living in an age when all imagery is possible, you must do something with it to make it your own, to turn it into art, and what is more, your own art.
We have the same basic elements of light, shade, colour, form, line, dimension, scale, and so on - limitless possibilities and permutations of visual constructs. Art, I suppose, distinguishes itself from nonart in shades of subtlety. Contemporary practice tends towards not distinguishing.
emf
So the image then, but not just in image form. I recognise that thought as being one which has led and still informs and leads my practice, into Moving Image and the formation of image sculptures and art inventions. I am seeking that crossover, and deliberately trying to confuse the senses around vision and thought, and feeling and experience. To experience the touch of an image. To feel the sense of space and fall through the dark bits.
Of course, sometimes the image is enough.
emf
6th March 2012
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