Here’s one of my framed stills from Project Survey in the Zeitgeist Summer Exhibition 2015 (see top left). I like the landscapes themselves but the frames are wrong – too heavy, too strident. They need to be narrower width wise but deeper front to back – more box / object-like.
I’m having the usual internal tussle about frame colour. Black’s perhaps more traditional and gives clean lines but it draws too much attention to itself. The work’s not about the frame – it almost needs to be invisible – which makes me think white may be a better option.
Don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but obvious approach is to look at 2 past works:
I’m right, the white frame pushes focus onto the image but I don’t like it – the whole thing looks to wishy-washy.
However the 20mm black frame looks carefully considered. The extra distance between the dark frame and the print allows the image to breathe more fully. Not sure about the pale wood element but this was a practical necessity at the time that could be overcome another way.
Tracey Emin says the process of curating isn’t just about what looks good with this or that. There must be ‘an ethos – a theory – behind it; something you want to change. For Emin, it’s about finding a way to alter peoples’ perceptions of looking at something, to get them to see it in a new way. The example she gives involves her curation of Egon Schiele’s work where her strategy was to avoid the usual approaches by limiting colour and density in favour of making the work feel light; ‘to raise his work up’.
In many ways, this perhaps is a subtle shift in approach to curating but somehow it helps; it gives a clue towards unravelling the mysteries of delivering a good exhibition.
Source: Ben Harding & Richard Bright, ‘What do artists do all day? Tracey Emin’, BBC Scotland Arts Production, 2015
This is an art exhibition by 6 artists who’ve used an intriguing collaborative working process over an extended period of time. The work has passed from hand to hand and interventions been made as each individual responds to what has gone before, dismantling, embellishing, augmenting, obliterating, leaving traces or overwriting.
This project is about the process of working rather than the end result, part collaboration and part creative conversation, part parlour game and part contest/clash/collision. Accompanying Twitter conversations between participants played an integral role as information and dis-information.
Catalyst was shown at Husk Gallery in June 2015 and involves artists Sasha Bowles, Rosalind Davis, Justin Hibbs, Evy Jokhova, Marion Michell and Annabel Tilley.
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This film is a beast to tame.
On the surface, the task is easy – link shots to make a simple animation. However I’ve been working on this on and off for 3 months now. Seven different cuts exist. I’m starting to feel film may not be for me!
Typically, breakthrough emerges from an unexpected direction. The Song of the Shirt, 1979, a 16mm 135 minute long black and white film directed by Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling about the position of working women in the 1840’s. What’s key is less about content, more about the way it’s put together:
Grainy or pixelated footage
Simple content
Moving image inserting itself into static shots
Static shots sliding into film
Images scuttling in and out of view
No surety about how long a clip will remain in sight
Nor in which direction it will skulk off
I need some video footage – the first I’ve ever tried to shoot, still made with the mobile phone camera. I also need sound. I’m working on the final cut now.
Meanwhile, the correct title for this work still eludes me…
Strangely, this shot below is pretty much as the eye of the camera recorded it, although it looks more painting than photograph. Close inspection reveals a reflection from the train intruding in the top left hand corner.
Some time ago I found myself unaccountably fascinated by footpaths and gateways – the power of their eroded surfaces to reveal a history of use. Over the last few years I’ve also been making collages from 1930’s postcards and contemporary images. Elizabeth Grotz talks about the latency of the past impacting the present to open up possibilities for new futures.(1) I seem compelled to link past and present. I find this interconnectivity comforting – a hint of the past living on in the present.
I thought the link might be marginality – abandoned things marooned in a sea of lost purpose – but now suspect it’s concerned with liminality.
In recent photographic work, I get on a train which removes me from the version of myself that lives at home. Somewhere during the journey I transmute into artist professional. Between these two points, I’m freed from myself, lulled into a semi-meditative state by the journey so images made at this point can capture this feeling of liminality. In my collages, one part of the raw material is tethered to the 1930’s and the other to 2015. This allows me to enter a space of temporal liminality where the potential of what’s made is open-ended and anything becomes possible. My fascination with footpaths and gateways also links to time-based liminality. I think the effect can be multiplied, so for example the different identities of the women portrayed in the images I use create their own liminal impact.
The subject matter, concepts and materials I’m drawn to are ones with some kind of tension in them where they’re tethered to apparently contradictory positions and where I feel compelled to explore what happens in the liminal space in-between.
Any liminal state can only exist for a short time before everything finds itself dumped back into reality.
Most work will be altered by the liminal experience; it emerges in a different position than before.
1 Grosz, E. (2004). The nick of time politics, evolution & the untimely. USA: Duke University Press.
