Please don’t let this be mistaken for one of those blog posts where the author justifies or excuses his prolonged absence. This is not a forum I use to keep up any kind of profile. It’s more of an online workbook, a place to consolidate my thoughts about my work. As such it becomes a record of most of my creative output, most of which I have been documenting elsewhere and as such I feel the need to make note of it here.

Today Blog – The premise is simple: once a week I make a collage on a 6” x 4” postcard from a red-top tabloid newspaper. These are para-surrealist compositions with no political agenda beyond the suggestion that these tabloids are documents presented to us as fact, yet are often surreal in themselves. The physical objects are filed away in a photo album and I consider the scans of the collages to be the finished object. I create them by hand, and this limits the level of manipulation available to me. Manipulation seems to be the key word here; I work only with an art-knife and a Pritt-stick, demonstrating my limited ability to edit the images I use, all of which are airbrushed and highly manipulative in their original context. There is probably more to this in critical terms, but really my overarching objective is to amuse myself, hopefully others too.

Disjecta – I have been working with Mike Saunders on this idea of ‘themed poetry mixtapes’. It started as a chain of emails; whenever we came across a poem about alcohol we enjoyed we’d email it to the other. This evolved into other themes, a blog to house them all, and recently the first Disjecta booklets. These were hand cut and stitched on a sewing machine by Mike and myself. The run of fifty booklets will be disseminated for free by Papergirl Norwich, a so-called non-curated project which calls for submissions from artists that will be rolled up and distributed on the streets by cyclists (a-la paper girl). It would have been easy to distribute these among friends and colleagues but we want chance to play a part in the way people encounter these booklets. I have enjoyed chancing upon good poems which fit our themes and I hope that experience is replicated when people receive the booklets.

It wouldn’t really be appropriate to provide this kind of explanation for Today and Disjecta on their respective blogs, as they are themselves the product, or at least a large part of the product.

Poems – This is something I don’t usually discuss on here, however I have recently been writing about the work of Sarojini Lewis and as such some of my thoughts about Locus have entered into the poems. I have said of the poems that they are not ‘about’ her work, but speak through it. That is to say my aim is not ekphrastic repetition, but to seek a subjective understanding of the concepts at work in Sarojini’s photography and start from there. As such the new work has become about absences and miscommunication, there are figures and places which recur but only through the photographer’s struggle to represent them in her work. I should clarify that the figure in the poems is not intended to be Sarojini herself. I should also probably post one of two of the poems, otherwise the above is all abstract, but they are to be assessed and I feel they shouldn’t be published until that process is complete. I’m really hoping to work towards a physical product that encompasses the poems and some of Sarojini’s work at a later date.

'Concept'

I am currently working on an exhibition, Locus, which will take place in February. A lot of finer details are still being ironed out, but here is a working 'concept' for my contribution to the show:

"For the past five months I have been photographing Anglia Square, a shopping centre in Norwich due to be demolished and replaced by a new shopping precinct. Through the premise of documenting its current state the themes and boundaries of what my work really concerns have emerged. I am interested in the evocation of place using referential forms; photography and (through collaboration with Mike Saunders) field recordings, as opposed to representational forms such as painting.

Photography’s mimetic qualities are representative of a constrained perspective. To this end, there is a narrator present in most photographic images. My work aims to evoke a sense of place which exists independently of the artist, in the unoccupied perspective where the artist-narrator’s presence is covert. His hand is only noticeable by its absence; he is a ghost who releases the shutter.

The strategy I have devised in order to achieve this, firstly imposes physical boundaries which define the area I am working in, stipulating that (within reason) all equipment used has to have been purchased within the limits of Anglia Square. To this end I have been using equipment which provides little artistic control, such as fixed exposure cameras from charity shops. To further the loss of control I have made a conscious effort to shoot objectively and unemotively, avoiding the inclusion of people, before rewinding the exposed film to the beginning of the roll and exposing it again so that any unconscious aspect of the natural gaze is removed.

What we are left with then is perhaps less a fragment of what we see and more a reflection of how we think and remember; a non-unilinear evocation, a trace of something which has existed, presented in a way closer to how we remember it than traditional documentary photography."

The work will be presented with Mike Saunders' field recordings/sound maps, which ever label you deem appropriate, and a selection of work by Sarojini Lewis.

I will document further developments here, including experiments with 35mm slide projections which will also feature in the exhibition.

Magdalen Street Celebration Exhibition

I had not initially intended to frame my work; I have discussed at length the panoramic border, which is in itself a frame. However, I was not allocated a space until I dropped my work off a week before it was shown and as such thought it would be safe to frame the work. Like much of the progress in this project I was pleasantly surprised with something I felt was out of my control; the black frame I used compliments the images’ borders without being too heavy handed in its reflection of them.

When I dropped my work off I was able to choose a space; a rectangular annex room, about 10ft x 3ft with a window at one end, roughly A4 size. The room is in a semi-derelict state. It has gallery-ness (it has been painted white and has a framed piece of work in it) but it retains the feeling of a post-functional space. It is neither a gallery space, nor a room and this state of flux becomes a metaphor for Anglia Square itself.

One reason I was apprehensive about using a frame is that I often feel frames are with the work and not part of it, but here the frame not only complements the photographs’ borders but the glass also acts as a catalyst for the potential reading of the images as reflections. The window, which is opposite the frame, both literally and figuratively reflects the overlapped images; the outcome is one of duplicity and layers.

Another layer, or indeed series of layers, is present in the sound-map created by Mike Saunders which is playing simultaneously through speakers and headphones. This has the desired affect in-situ which I had hoped for: blurring the distinction between naturally occurring noises from the outside world with the carefully mapped audio arrangement. The presence of the sound-map and the window provide the reader with options as to how they choose to read the work; whether or not to wear the headphones, whether or not to look through the window and if so, from which side?

The fact that the images are printed on standard 6x4 paper and that they are mounted using photo corners gives them an ephemeral quality which acts as a doorway to the theme of memory but not to a specific or personal memory. Both the images and the audio play with each other, are fragments of context arranged in a para-surrealist manner to optimise the space for subjective readings for the viewer. The layers of sound and image become the strands in the diagram I previously referenced by John Berger representing the non-unilinear process of memory.

Sean Edwards, No Dust Adheres

Stills from No Dust Adheres, Sean Edwards (2010)

In February I went to see No Dust Adheres, a film by Sean Edwards which explores social histories around urban commercial space and architecture through a melee of tracking shots of a soon-to-be demolished shopping centre near his home. Looking at my panoramic images after revisiting Sean Edwards' work has affected the way I view them. The cinematic framing I previously mentioned has become far more pronounced and I find a real sense of movement comes about from the overlapping frames and the merging of images. Through this merging of images a panoramic landscape is created and we are forced to read the work in a set order, to move through the frames as one continuous image, much like Edwards' film which moves along a set horizontal line. However, by using still images the pace of movement and reading is set by the viewer, not the artist.

The overlapping in Edwards' work is the result of shop window reflections; showing my images to a friend recently she thought my multiple exposures were reflections. I am happy for that reading/implication to lay latent in the images. My reasons for using multiple exposures, as I previously mentioned, were to represent a non-unilinear thought process but the implication of reading them as reflections is relevant too.

The press release for No Dust Adheres describes 'the camera's lingering shots of the building's interior alluding to film genres such as science fiction or the haunted house.' Indeed there is a hypnotic effect to the work; I remember watching the film sat on a cold floor in Outpost gallery alone wondering if the natural sounds of traffic and life outside were part of the film. I am still unsure whether or not the film has any audio.

I have recently been talking to a friend of mine about creating a 'sound map' of Anglia Square to accompany a forthcoming exhibition of these images. In writing about his love of Noise music, Mike Saunders says: 'I am constantly interested in it in a way that is either completely visceral or indescribable... it is so ready, so malleable for questioning.' Mike recently conducted a walk from Norwich to Cambridge. Reading through his notes regarding the affect Noise music had on him during this expedition (which can be read in full here) it seems his journey is more of an experiment than a hike. During one section of his walk across the Fens Mike describes 'the surreal remove that this music inhabits the landscape.' What I hope to achieve by making use of sound recordings in the exhibition is the blurring of natural and recorded noises, to recreate the unknowing I felt when watching No Dust Adheres.