- Venue
- Jaywick Martello Tower
- Location
- East England
Rob Smith has chosen a perfectly peripheral and desolate place for the first of his Windscale sites. Jaywick is an intriguing place, a curious and dissonant mixture of the forbidding and the quirkily ordinary. There is the Brace of Pistols pub, a warning perhaps to the unwitting visitor of the welcome they might expect, and then there are the houses, all higgledy-piggledy Heath Robinson affairs of prefab embellishment, waiting to be swallowed by the encroaching sea. The concrete promenade and listless line of sea gives an oddly sterilized and unreal experience of coast. In contrast the series of time lapse videos captured by Smith’s anemometer and camera perched quirkily atop the Martello Tower give an incredibly varied and at times sublime experience of the weather at this inhospitable location.
Other sites for the project are also indicative of his interests in the liminal; a Victorian warehouse in a swamp on the edge of Shanghai, and a church in Hackney overlooking an area overshadowed by the impending Olympic site. Into all these Windscale sits as a seemingly non-judgmental counterpoint, constantly observing and recording the visual reverberations from its fixed viewpoint.
Smith’s works often have a circularity about them, in either a physical sense or as a kind of conceit. In this case the anemometer’s reading of the wind speed controls the pixellation of the image and the frame rate in the video (a view of sea, sky and anemometer) so that when windy the frames change quickly and are more pixellated and when still the frames slow and are clearer. In the Beaufort scale descriptions of how the sea looks describe the numerical force of the wind and so the image reflects the Beaufort scale back onto the sea.
Viewing the piece live as a projection at Jaywick gives it a monumental feel and the constantly changing pixellation process compels one to watch. Online (www.windscale.net), a new video is uploaded each day documenting the last 24 hours. Here the small scale of the video gives a more effervescent feel to the piece, but if you watch over a period of days a relationship to the place and its weather starts to develop. This is a strength of Smith’s work; an ability to gently persuade us to look more closely at what silently surrounds us. A moon rises swiftly over the sea and then the anemometer slows fogbound before clearing to a full blue sky. Clouds swoop and zoom across days in astonishingly varying directions and at night the anemometer sometimes slows to appear as a weirdly illuminated piece of spaceship or dislocated insect. If you become a Jaywick junkie you can download Smith’s desktop screensaver for a daily dose of pixellation. This simple method of disseminating his ideas seems appropriate for Smith whose work is best when the lightness of touch reflects the temporal and fleeting elements he seeks out.
