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.
More interest in the Offcutter – though I’ve confused myself by giving it different names such as Real/Non-Real (basic and explicit), Luddvision (when I was into the black & white aspect and technical simplicity). Hoping to take it to Manchester, I get it set up in the studio, then compelled through 4am angst to drag back the images through the ether to improve on them.
In a way that proves how useful is the process of taking my cue for the next move in the work from the work itself. Also I’ve had some crisp comments about my standards of workmanship, so had to check it didn’t look more wavy and wobbly than need be.
As part of the fun IS the seizing of stray bits of cardboard/tissue/cobweb to chuck into the mix, I must be simultaneously polished yet raw.
A happy thing – a neuroscientist has agreed to collaborate on this multi-titled project – Offcutter, Luddvision, Real/No-Real. We will explore what happens in the brain of the observer when they are looking at my concocted landscapes.
The neuroscientist has been experiementing with virtual reality landcsapes, and testing what happens to stereoscopic vision as the experimentee walks through a space is that expands and contracts.
I’ve made a clip of a journey through the Offcutter world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8ACyO9W1cc&feature…
Smacking things together for an Offcutter session is an antidote to the laborious process I usually go through when making sculpture. It’s fast and exciting and though the starting point may be some particular object I often chuck in oddments or scraps of things that have been fermenting in the general mulch of the studio.
I’m trying to formulate a general-purpose statement about it that sounds down-to-earth but with an overtone of erudition, accurate yet obliquely self-aggrandising.
Also I don’t like the idea of turning into A Photographer – the expense! the need for quality! on the other hand another winter in the studio endlessly sanding MDF or wringing out PVA-soaked cloth is grim.
Slides!!??
Putting together a proposal for another outing for Offcutter I came across some photos I’d taken of the morning sun on the kitchen wall. Initially they were natural – leaves, glass, bit later I put objects in the path of the light.
I would have liked to continue this summer, but there hasn’t really been enough sun.
Now the Queen of Hungary project space I run with Dominique Rey is empty for a bit, I’m going to set up my Offcutter materials and try out on a large scale all the notes, maquettes, models etc that have been brewing.
The wish to get on with this was triggered partly by seeing the Heatherwick Studios show at the V&A, where there is clearly a lot of mucking with matter about going on – or do I mean modular construction?
