My second day involved going to see artist Lucy Helton, who was also presenting the next night at the same event I was invited to talk at.
Lucy has a studio quite a long way from where I was staying…It was beautiful getting there and I started to get that feeling of hyper-awareness, when you don’t know where you are and everything is more vivid.
It was a shared space occupying the seventh floor of a large warehouse type building. I had come across Lucy’s work at Fotofest earlier that year when I had gone to Houston to undertake the portfolio reviews with my own work. Lucy had work on show as part of the Biennial – the theme was The Future of the Planet – and her work Actions of Consequence was a fictional representation of what earth might look like without human life in 200 years time. I didn’t know Lucy when I first saw it, but I totally loved it and went back to see it three times. I was reminded at the time of how much I had fallen in love with Joan Fontcuberta’s work Stranger than Fiction at the Science Museum, on show in London last year – all about constructing the narrative – and Lucy’s work, using varied viewpoints, sometimes including appropriated imagery of scientific origin – chimed with that for me. Her book, which she made using these images, is immensely good (sold out). The graphic landscapes which strike themselves across double pages have a bleak feel that avoid referencing the sublime of historical landscape painting / Caspar David Friedrich, because the position of the viewer in relation to the space is ambiguous. The special edition comes in a black acrylic case which looks like it dropped straight out of another galaxy. Instead of looking at a distance, we are in a strange world of emptiness.
I was also able to look at Transmission – a book she made using redundant fax machines (also sold out). This is presented in a cardboard tube reminiscent of time capsules. It is a great piece of work. Well thought out, articulate, form chiming with content. Again, like I said in a previous post, I think it’s interesting sometimes what I drift towards as something to enjoy because it is often completely different to what I make myself. Here minimal colours and a well thought out encyclopaedic approach is at the opposite end of the spectrum to my all-out-there-heart-on-the-sleeve textural making.
I really enjoyed sharing my work with Lucy. It was a bit like an impromptu crit and, like the day before with Elaine, it’s immensely nourishing to get input from people who quickly understand where you are coming from and give you some new references.
There is a difference for me showing work in England and showing work in America. I can’t really describe what it is exactly, but there is something about being out of my comfort zone that makes me less self-conscious…. more…. fearless maybe. It’s like, you’ve arrived from thousands of miles away, you’re not sure of the protocols, so you just kind of….ask. I don’t do that so much in the UK. I think that’s the point of residencies too – to be out of what is familiar, to be more open to some possibilities. It’s a bit like learning to read – there are the moments when you know that you are communicating, because you are saying the right words in the right order, but the sense of everything seems one step removed – like there is a pane of glass in the way.
It turned out Lucy will be visiting my home town early next year so we can meet up and I can show her where I work. A great coincidence.
Later on I also meet Delphine Bedel, a publisher presenting a new book she has worked on by Virginie Rebetez – both of them will be speaking at the same Salon as Lucy and myself. I have finally begun to make broad connections between groups of people that I have been getting to know over many years. Delphine is someone I actually met a few years ago at Photobook Bristol but I had not joined up the dots. World is big/big/small/small. Virginie has made a very moving piece entitled Out of the blue, about a young woman who just vanished one day and was never found. It’s an extraordinary story and a really interesting use of photography, playing on the way in which psychics use images of missing people to create narratives that lead in all directions.
I am really excited about this next bit coming up in my week in New York, which is all about presenting my own artist book Conversations with my mother at the Photobook Salon for 10x10Photobooks. I feel more confident about this now I have arrived and am really happy about being amongst the other book-artists. All very different practices with fascinating stories. I am also reinvigorated about exploring the book as an art form – seeing the physicality of Lucy’s book made with a fax machine in particular has been very inspiring…I am also now thinking of the ways I could go back to my work Consumed, photocopies of my mother’s food and perishables that I have been making for 4 years. This is something I am pretty sure is destined for a book…. today has really inspired me to go back and start playing about with some dummy ideas.
