This most recent piece of work returns to ideas originating in the Snapshot Series, and before that in the Suspending Closure Series, both in terms of technique and the diversions occurring in the significations made in these photographic images. The difference in this piece, The Fighting Temeraire As If, is that there are more layers than previously and it is more complex and specific in terms of content and signification.
I made this for an exhibition called Art Ahoy 2013, which is currently still on show until the end of the month at UCS The Foyer, Waterfront Building, Ipswich. I made it site specific as the show links in with the Maritime Festival and the photographs I took of the dock area during the rebuilding over recent years, worked well as a factual reference against which I could overlay with a kind of fantasy (i.e. Sci-Fi) reference; which again links with the Un-fictions ideas. It also echoes the postmodern concerns for mixing old and new, for allegory and for borrowing found images. But the Temeraire is referenced only in so far as the composition and part of the original background detail; but I have taken an image of a ship that was really docked in Ipswich and the starship Enterprise replaces the tug boat of the original Temeraire painting so that fiction and fact are compromised.
It takes those ideas and merges the ideas around digitalisation into the piece to some extent as it forms into a grid. It has a proliferation of images as well as an overriding composition, making this another breakthrough. It was very complex to work on as well as conceive, and aesthetically more involved than many recent pieces of work, so this has significantly developed the ideas and altered my way of working. Other pieces along these lines of complexity are in the pipeline, but also the Un-Fictions cut-out annuals are due to be revisited. It seems that the project at hand of developing practice and sifting through ideas are nearing a point of conclusion, where there is more clarity in the concepts and the research questions have been resolved more considerably than they were at the point of concluding the Masters degree.
