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.

Further Experiments with Multiple Exposures

After my initial experiments with multiple exposures I took my Wide Pic Panoramic camera on holiday with me; this was when I realised that the Wide Pic Panoramic is not really designed for rewinding a frame at a time. I lost half a roll of film attempting to create some double exposures when the teeth stopped winding the film on. It seems I was lucky when I created my initial multiple exposures at Anglia Square and would have to re-think my work process. These new images were created by exposing the whole roll of film, rewinding it completely and then exposing it a second time.

I have said before that the equipment I am using takes a lot of control away from the artist; fixed shutter speed and aperture, a machine in the chemist prints my images automatically. Exposing the entire film twice in this manner also means I have no control over which images are overlapped, or even if the frames lie cleanly over the top of one another, indeed some of the images have two overlaps. The resulting images could perhaps be described as para-surrealist; the loss of control providing free associations between frames. And while perhaps not ‘semi-conscious’ image making, I tried as much as possible to free myself of as much responsibility as possible. To this end my only concerns were finding compositions with strong horizontal lines to complement the ‘panoramic’ view, providing a vague uniformity in the images so that where they overlap they would hopefully complement one another, and also to try not to take the same photo twice.

Some of these images are more successful than others – echoes in shapes and overlapping text for example are very pleasing – but I still feel the images are a series, regardless of whether or not one is stronger than the other. I have been given the opportunity to exhibit some of my work in an empty shop unit in Anglia Square as part of the Magdalen Street Celebration and would like to exhibit a series of images. There is an unconscious relationship between the overlapped exposures in the individual images, the next stage is to find a way in which to arrange these chance pairings as a collective group.