How distracting the moors are as you go towards Manchester on the M62! The road’s high and fast, and rises and falls around you like a roiling ocean. I was on my way there last weekend to take part in Word of Warning, an ‘Emergency’ event where I was putting up Real/Non-Real (the current manifestation of OffCutter) at the Castlefield Gallery.
The idea behind my work was to make a tabletop landscape of small sculptures, assemblages, mirrors, moving a camera through it so an image of the journey appears in an adjascent screen. I turn the camera on its side, suddenly drop the lens down, swirling the viewer around.
It turned out that when the camera ‘looks’ at itself on the screen, it goes crazy and behaves like an image in an infinite reflection, mutlipying and echoing its form. Gorgeous!!
There were lovely artists to talk to, and I had a wondrous time.
Took Off-cutter in the form of Real/Non-Real to Manchester this weekend as part of habarts ‘Emergency’, more than 40 live art pieces across the city. I was in Castlefield Gallery, with objects set out on trestles. I moved the the camera around very slowly amongst so the images were projected onto the wall behind, somtimes turning the camera so the horizon tipped and slid.
Jonathan, the technician, suggested setting the camera on black and white, as the objects themselves are all monochrome/wood. This had the advantage of not having flashes of incidental colour from the audience.
A weird thing turns out to happen when the camera looks at itself on screen – it spins into infinity like looking in back-to-back mirrors. Delicious!
Now I want more lenses, and to scale it all up, bigger screen, also more minute assemblages. And a bigger more complex black feathery thing.
