On Saturday 16th May I travelled to Grimsby to speak at The Lightlines Conference whose theme this year was Sight & Site. Featured artists were Jo Booth, Bradford, Gill Hobson, Grimsby, David Cotterrell, London and myself. I gave an overview of my interests and how I have used found footage from the Connection series of diptychs in 2009 to begin using personal family images and questioning whether across the board we record in similar ways and if stored photographs within families are the same. These home and family memories led me to thinking about how we display these, from the slide shows I remember from the 1970’s further back via cine film and pre cinema to the produced Kinora reels, the Lumiere brothers home movie machine used by the ‘middle classes’. I sourced some of these reels and produced photographic prints from these e.g. The Bumps. The Kinora used a circular flick book mechanism as did the larger more engineered mutoscope. I, as a collaboration with my father, an engineer, designed and re-engineered a mutoscope which housed an animation and also played out a text critiquing contemporary models of display. Considering all these old modes of display and their embedded cultural codes I sought out specifically children’s magic lantern slides and began experimenting with superimposition and enlarging. Some of these works were part of Gaia Tedone’s symposium at Whitechapel Gallery July 2014. These were also accompanied by a film and live reading performance. This has all given the groundwork for this project ‘Part Coded and the Bi-visual’ and the research and practical investigations now beginning.
The conference was a really inspiring day and potential collaborations are in the pipeline. The other speakers were enlightening and intriguing and the audience and Abbey Walk Gallery, Grimsby very generous with their time, hospitality, interest and questions.
http://www.abbeywalkgallery.com/lightlinesproject.php
