Supporting Material, Work in Progress, Making Process

I have omitted most of the images I submitted for expediency as most are elsewhere on the blog.

 Street Compositions

I have various collections of images which represent sequential obsessions. I have this need to collect all the variations I can find, so that I can refer to them when I am looking for imagery to use in work, but more, so that I can look at the world and see it through the framework of my collected images or aesthetic.

There is something about these "naturally occurring" images which totally intrigues me. I love that the highest art and aesthetic is possible in the most ordinary places, and is not dependent upon magnificent settings. I love that they are readily available no matter what, and that all it takes is the heightened sense of framing to see. It is choice and visual preferences, and in a way, looking in the same way I would look to sketch, making these photographs sketches. A hundred people in a street given a blank frame would not place them in the same way, and even random scattering of frames would not produce the same results.

There is an inner series of choices going on. Some of these are difficult to explain, like why I sometimes like things centered, and why I sometimes like things to lead out of the image. There is such a joy in flattening shapes out, and making them all equal by abstracting them. I adore the shapes created with offcuts, and have made work from offcuts of paper, card and mdf from a kitchen fitters. My local glass shop has a supply of strange shaped offcuts I am welcome to use - but I really can't take advantage of that until I have a proper workshop. As it is, I tend to keep offcuts from work for their shapes and future work. I'm spilling out.

It's the shapes... I say "naturally occurring", but of course such shapes are usually by products, and the discarded negative. The placing of the patches of street tarmac and fittings is dependent on function, and yet I can read meaning and composition and create links. It's all evidence of something, and not just of roadworks. It's evidence of humanity and nature.

The street compositions look at the given elements abstracted from their function, and regarded totally for different qualities of line, shape and density. And above all, they are all about the relationships between these, and the balances and imbalances they infer. I realise they are ready-mades. They are ready made compositions, ready-made photographic drawings. Further, all photography could be said to be ready-made imagery.

Although I used the Bricks and no Street Composition in my Moving Image Construction, I know that another project will be right to use these images in – their time will come.

I have about 300 recent working images of the Street Compositions and of the Bricks. I recognise that there is a difference in talking about one or two images, or a large amount. I know there is something about sheer volumes of images which in itself reveals, and so I somewhat represent that in showing more than a few in this folder.

  

Bricks

I am investigating and uncovering what meaning there is for me in the imagery of streets and bricks, and linking them to metaphors of psychology. They have elements of the ready made, and the artistic/sketching practice of choosing elements on the basis of qualities other than their original purpose, whilst not obfuscating or clouding their form. It is a personal belief that brick walls signify constructs of human thinking, in their infinite alterations of universal elements, and how each component is affected by chemical or weathering conditions, or the aging process. Patterns reveal something of the decades they were created in, much as cultural thinking.

In fact, I have even more images from some years ago, during my degree, taken on my non digital film camera, which are languishing in folders amongst many other photographs and slides, waiting to be scanned and digitised for use one of these days. Many other collections include, bark, trees, skies, clouds, objects, shadows, hands and other more abstract series.

I often use images of bricks in work, as a background, signifying the realm of humanity, really.

I have been thinking more deeply about what it is exactly about bricks. Bricks represents to me the construct of psychology, and the structure or pattern of thoughts we as humans naturally create. I am interested in collecting the images of irregularities in brick walls – whether by design or by weathering. Sometimes the pattern is still fairly regular, and the variations are within the individual bricks themselves, with different colourings due to the chemical constitution or happenings within the firing processes. Recycled London brick stock make the most interesting walls. The real treasures to find, however, are the cracks, the fissures, the crumblings. I also like the abrupt transitions between styles, or those odd patches of damp or bleaching. 

These to me are like the individual psychological constructs – it is all the same material, but always unique, and always that belief in solidity.

Making an Inbuilt Installation

During a group seminar about the installation arrangements for the MA unit submission, I realised how truly disinterested I am in being descriptive, and how redundant such arrangements can be anyway.

There are various exhibiting experiences I have had which lead me to this thinking -

The first time I left work in a gallery which someone else was to install, I left a page of specific instructions for the arrangement of everything - it was a video installation of a TV sitting on a chair. When I came along to the exhibition, it was arranged differently to my instructions, but I realised that I quite liked what they had done with it, and that it actually fitted the space better than my original intentions. The new arrangement better worked around the idiosyncrasies of the gallery and the other works in the exhibition, which I had not seen before.

My degree show piece was a video light installation which I had planned for a high wall of the space. When we arrived to set up, we discovered that someone had installed an enormous light fitting there, making it useless for me. I had to find a new space, and fit in around everyone else's work. I found a brilliant high spot, almost at the ceiling, which again, worked better for the piece, allowing it to seem even more naturally generated. This experience especially awoke the possibilities of finding the best space for a work in any place, however unlikely. There are always some variations which will alter and add to the context.

Since then I have a couple of times had the opportunity to choose a space to show work in unusual and irregular spaces. I admit that I tend to choose odd corners which are sometimes missed by viewers, but they have been the best places for the work, and gave the intrepid or observant viewer who did experience it an added pleasure of discovery of both the work and the context of the work.

You would think that, especially with moving image work, certain exhibiting conditions would be taken as read - that it is shown in as dark a space as possible so that it does not have to compete with lighting, that sound pieces are not too near so that they clash, that it would actually be turned on, and so on. These self evident things do not always happen, but that aside, generally people curating or putting up exhibitions will have such common sense, and as with paintings or more static work, will place them with a sympathetic eye.

If I sent a painting of drawing, I would not expect to provide instructions such as this way up, place on the wall, image side showing, etc. I exaggerate of course, but with moving image, I expect the same basic considerations. Beyond that, the point I am gradually getting to, is a wonderful variety of options which depend on the infinite variations of the space, the inventiveness of the curator, and the consideration of good exhibition practice. In other words, apart from if a I have a specific need that the work is projected or in a TV, I am more than happy for my work to be shown in a variety of settings. Surprise me, allow me to surprise myself. Use the room, the walls, the ceiling, the corners. If I get a chance to be there and choose, I will perhaps go for the straight onto the projection screen option, or there may be an interesting nook which suggests itself for projection.

Again, if I sent a painting of sculpture, a curator would feel more free to interpret where it should be placed - it is not always in the central and most obvious place, and there are many legitimate options. All work must by definition be somewhat site specific even if that is to a small degree.

Another experience which formed this view was the opportunity I had to see the same exhibition in vastly different venues, a touring group show of British Council art which I happened to see both in London and Prague. The settings and context could hardly have been more different. In London they used a large industrial warehouse with white painted walls and raw fitting around - the sort of place really expected to host contemporary art, and probably something the artists were expecting. In Prague, the venue was the most ornate, baroque, flock-wallpapered, gold trimmed and oppressive set of rooms and corridors you could imagine. How incredibly different the work looked. How it changed according to the place. I wrote an essay about that for my degree, and still consider that experience when pondering this issue.

I also have seen my own work in a variety of settings. It's fascinating to see how certain aspects come across differently if it is on a public screen, a cinema screen, projected in a gallery dark space, on a TV monitor, or put into a particular installation or setting. Perhaps the point is that there is not really one definitive setting. If the work is strong enough it really should be able to withstand different ways of showing, because that's what's going to happen anyway, even if it was made with something particular in mind.

With my popup theViewergallery, I have taken license with moving image, and shown it both by adapting it to fit into a venue, and specifically creating setting that can me movable - for example: I choose and edit a playlist of my own and other's work, and have shown that at both ends of the exhibition space, one projected, one on TV, starting at different times. I'd like to explore such multiple screenings more, as I believe it is a great experiment in retaining visual interest while portraying the reality of nonlinear vision. I also have edited two different artists' work to play side by side on the same screen as an exercise in similarity and juxtaposition. When theViewergallery was installed in a shed, I knew I would have to compete with a lot of light, and so made the screening adapt. All these situations show the inherent flexibility required of moving image.

Last year or unit I investigated some of the problems in distributing moving image, and the difficulties artists have in selling work. There is also an increasing difficulty in storage and archiving moving image within art institutions, and in the agreements to exhibit and install being so specific that the work becomes obsolete along with the equipment used for playing it. Added to that are issues about copyright, and there are a whole raft of problems which painters and sculptors easily bypass.

I think the solution to this is partly in the flexibility of the artist, to accept that installation instructions are serving suggestions, and to allow curators to reinterpret work according to settings, even if that is not according to taste. Menus aside, unless the work has clear elements which are intrinsic to it, once it's in a gallery, the artist's control is really lost anyway.

These above are some of the underlying reasons which eventually lead me to my revelation. Other threads are in previous work, and the concepts themselves - I have often made moving image which seeks to play on the illusion of space within. It's all illusion anyway. There is a space within the box, within the screen, which works differently. Even for today's visually sophisticated audience there are some ways of showing film which have sense of wonder that there might be depth within. It's the play between the flatness of surface and the infinite amount of space and depth.

In the light of all this I decided to really examine my thoughts about installation and presenting work for the MA submission, and other settings. All those strains of thought collided in a new idea, that I make this moving image as an inbuilt installation, or an inherent installation - that the moving image itself is an installation and has elements within it that makes it an installation however it may be shown, considering all the variations mentioned above.

I construct an internal installation using moving image, as if I am carving out a space or shape, wherever it is shown or projected. Movable, adaptable, suitable for all weathers. In a way, I retain my artist's control on the work into the gallery, because no matter what exhibiting decisions are made, it is as if placing a sculpture in different locations - it retains its properties, as moving image tends to lose them.

This is a very significant development in my moving image, and one which I feel I will always incorporate in future work - I don't see how I could not do this now. Again, I look back at previous work and I see how I have been moving towards this, and making work like this but from different angles, and less deliberately.

I feel compelled to construct and destabilise the appearance of the brick structure at the same time. There can't be a static frame, or a feeling of solidity.

As the piece nears completion I will soon be able to try out all sorts of different places to show and project - it can still be projected on screen or on walls, It can be within TVs, and of course they can be placed anywhere. It can also be projected onto floors or corners - I'll see how well it works. In irregular gallery spaces, there will be all sorts of possibilities.

Making Construction

I have noticed that whenever I make a moving image piece it is important for me to be quite inventive - I need to figure out a new way of achieving something - usually the work dictates that, rather than me trying to find a home for a new technique.

I have certain underlying principles that rule me in making moving image - I never do anything that I couldn't do longhand, or analogue, if I really had to. Perhaps it is because I started out in darkrooms, but I only use the computer and digital technology as a faster sort of darkroom. I also see that I enact that quite literally, as the crossovers between stills, prints and film frames become increasingly interchangeable in my work. In the current piece, Construction, I have given myself a whole new raft of techniques and possibilities by printing out certain stills, filming them so that I can get a very hands-on creative control, and then reinserting and layering them into the movie files. Very time consuming! But I am so delighted with the authenticity of it. Every moment must be real and live. More and more I feel I can do anything in moving image that I can imagine, with enough slog.

  

The lights layer in Construction is trials I made in 2006 which led me to my degree piece Contraption. They are a variety of situations with torches, mirrors and reflections towards manipulation and alignment of light. I never forgot that footage but hadn't had cause to use it since, and so I was delighted when I retrieved it and found that it was right - there are elements of light just being, and of signalling in and out, which I wanted for Construction. I always remember filming, what I used, what I was thinking and how I was feeling. It also feels great when the right time comes around for using work.

 

light layer stills, Construction

Construction has taken an enormous amount of editing and paring away. The lights layer had to lose all its colour so as not to compete with the bricks - and editing them! I'll just say that even though I kept the filming compact, there was still a lot to edit, choose, trim, fix, and so on. Much like the brick boxes themselves, that was nothing but a situation of my own making.

During the Reflective Practice unit was the making day - Found People Vermeer - works I'd like to develop and make in the future. Manipulating the shadows and layering that was also a significant addition to my moving image arsenal. This moving in and out of the computer and camera, using stills, drawings and photographs, gives me more and more creative control - in fact in the piece of 2012, The Future Past Tense, it was the drawings that moved, and the video stills which merged like stills. Not that is really matters, but what does matter is that I can take an image out of a video, manipulate it live through a camera lens, or glass, or whatever I want, and then put it back. It's so completely different to clunky computer manipulation, which is not really.....real, or art.

Construction Stills

For me, a moving image work is not finished until I have made all the stills. It is so important to capture again the moments which happen when all the elements combine. Sometimes, these are not visible unaided, but having seen the stills, the eye finds those images and recognises them within the work.

Final Project Found Paintings

The Street Compositions and Bricks have led me directly into my next collection of images which I am now amassing and planning to be part of my final project. These are again found images, or rather, images which I must seek out. These Found Paintings are rarer by far than streets or bricks. They are weathered or accidental paintwork I notice as I am going about. Again, it is the abstracting eye which seeks them out, recognises them, captures them. It’s all about framing and reframing.

I don’t know as yet where they will lead me or how they will form part of the final piece, but I know they will, and I am rather thrilled and obsessed with them already. I love the collision of provenance which comes with them, about who is the artist. I would like to present them as a series of photographs to a painting competition. Who is to say they are not paintings. They possess all the qualities and concepts of paintings if I present them so.

My eye is developing all my internal rules about choosing and editing these. I will mindfully follow where they lead me.

These images will be uploaded as final unit work.

20th September 2013