One of the themes currently being explored in the 2015 British Ceramics Biennial, in Stoke, is ‘the production line’. The AirSpace studio artists currently have a show titled Assemblage, in the AirSpace Resources Room, that reflects our own interest in the process of production.
I thought this would be a prime opportunity to relook at the photos I take which inform my work. My final works are normally succinct sculptural or photographic entities that attempt to create perfect images – images that expose misunderstandings through their own warped logic. To get to these more resolved pieces, however, I do a lot of reading and looking and photographing and finding random, tenuous links between objects, images and stories. Spaghetti Grows On Trees is an ongoing collection of these photos that aid my thought processes, which looks at our relationship with the absurd and myths. For Assemblage I have bought four of these photos together in an attempt to create a dialogue. All of these images speak of objects we recognise but seem displaced or ‘other’ through manipulations of different kinds; their functions and forms are warped; roles are shifted and hence questioned. Objects, becoming protagonists in front of the camera, adopt new roles as ‘things’. One of these objects is a rock that I discovered in the wilderness whilst on a residency in Iceland. It has inexplicably regular holes that pass right the way through it, which seem far too precise to have been made by nature.
I am also experimenting with different ways of recognising the photographic print as ‘thing’. I have experimented for this exhibition with printing on Japanese Washi paper, which has a light and translucent materiality. I liked the manner in which it floats on the wall much like some of the objects in the photographs themselves. I think this is something that can still be pushed further.
I also used gravel and magnets to pin the prints to the wall. I was interested in gravel as dull decoration, how the individual stones as entities are disregarded when in mass. I was looking to highlight the beauty found in these objects, commonly out of view, through isolating them. This is a concept I’m growing more interested in through reading The Quadruple Object by Graham Harman, the idea that we forget certain properties of objects when they don’t appear active to our consciousness, i.e. how much of what surrounds us ‘retreats into a shadowy underworld’.
