I have found myself looking back at the many trails of thought currently punctuating my work, and have found a possible connection between the photographs I already have, and the potential of the dymaxion 2D template that I had explored briefly through my work with the Tate in St. Ives. The combination of these two elements would allow for the 2D images to become 3D through folded manipulation- linking back to the use of folding in maps and cartography processes. And having different images on the same net could also allow for a relationship to build between different photos from different locations, fabricating a visual journey between them. Having several of these folded 3D structures could also create a conversation between different images if they are presented in the same space. This could also make for an opportunity to then flatten them down again if I were to photograph the structures; abstracting the image from its original composition.
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Bram Arnold is an artist, pedestrian and writer who has just opened a new solo exhibition in Falmouth. With a working practice based on walking, his work is of great interest to me, as this and other journey-based themes are explored visually through maps, photographs and text. Bram had used the idea of intervention both in nature and in existing documents to produce unusual and very personal outcomes. In addition to these interventions, he also uses research and data collected from his own journeys to make work, providing an intimate insight into his personal responses to journeys that he has made. ‘Walking Home (Again)’ is the new show that has opened in Falmouth’s Fish Factory art space. It is an exhibition of a number of outcomes resulting from a journey that Bram took in 2009, walking from his home in London to where he was born in St. Gallen, Switzerland. The results of this walk are varied but what strikes me most are his text pieces ‘How To Walk’, a series of ‘text drawings’ that narrate Bram’s journey through the history of walking’s presence in literature. His own addition of text and annotations make the pieces very personal, and an all-round experience that gives a sense of Bram’s place in the world in relation to the journeys that he has made. Kurt Jackson’s guest lecture advertised his new exhibition opening in the Royal Cornwall Museum at the end of March. The exhibition, ‘Place’ presents a body of work in collaboration with 32 writers and poets from a range of backgrounds, who he challenged to send him to places in the UK that meant something personal to them. The task sent him all over the UK, from the Outer Hebrides to Cornwall, revealing the physical diversity of the country. The body of work sees a 500 word transcript written about the chosen location shown alongside Kurt’s work made in response to that place. He has been able to gain an insight into how this eclectic mix of writers and thinkers view the British landscape. As a result this starts to reveal reasons why people have specific attachments to certain places. Writing machines; a workshop that opened my eyes to the appropriation of text in order to avoid the normal procedures and conventions of writing from the imagination. Different mechanical procedures for writing can contribute to the content of the writing, and therefore the act or process of using the machine becomes a kind of performance. Using a machine like a typewriter or label maker makes you more aware of the process in comparison to using pen and paper, and ultimately the technology that you use has a direct impact on what appears.
I found myself breaking down what I have already written before in my journals and notebooks, and submitting it to a procedure which involved picking out the first word from each line; resulting in a piece of condensed text of my own writing. This process allows me to pick out words and phrases which have been created by the process. The work of David Hockney was re-identified to me in a recent TV documentary. Whilst his personal life and how this relates to his paintings is interesting, what I found that stuck out the most to me was Hockney’s attitude towards perspective. As demonstrated in his photo joiners, Hockney explores a new way of enhancing the special awareness of a location through the use of multiple photographs of the same place all layered together. According to Hockney, “Cameras see surfaces, not angles” and so it could be said that these joiners are an attempt at widening perspective and imitating three-dimensional space. A recent experiment in a new medium has been the use of video cameras to capture moving images, but staying in the same structure as his Polaroid or painted grids. Hockney has used a series of 9 individual cameras, connected to a bracket in a 3x3 grid formation attached to the front of a Landrover, and together they all film the same location at the same time, only each is at a slightly different angle. The advantage with this is that the video as a whole is entirely in focus, each camera focuses within its own view and so the foreground, middle ground and background are all equally in focus to one another, providing a heightened clarity to the images. Hockney has also explored the idea of time and its effect on a location, filming the same places time and time again to get an idea of how the environment changes seasonally. “The viewer becomes the vanishing point; the world opens out to you”. These recent photographs that I have taken are experiments to show the transition between landscapes within the printed context of a book. I thought that they were quite interesting to think about in the context of Hockney’s photographic work, and the combination of considered perspective and the act of capturing nature.
Measuring device
Process of making marks Journeys / Stories / Travel / Navigation Organic – Rocks – Landscape Walking Dissolve Mapping of the table Test the work out Colour – Movement between Print / Transferring Copying Explorer’s cave, vintage treasure chest Mapped out everything collected Chronological Unravelling, hiding Further development of material Incubation – not the right timing Data collection Select photos I don’t like first Break defaults – Intervention Formality, ordering Set-up work to be moved by others, rearranging Recording/tracing movements, speech This Saturday saw the culmination of the Tate Collective’s hard work over the past few months, in the Young@Tate event at Tate St Ives. The past few weeks had been fairly stressful planning, resourcing materials and ironing out details for risk assessments and other paperwork. In total, we had 4 main activities planned for young visitors to take part in; 1. Make us a story; an activity consisting of images from the exhibition being displayed and inviting visitors to write their own narratives about the work. 2. Surreal tours – taking visitors on a tour of the gallery, but the focus being on questioning the works and the information that the gallery provides. Supplying a number of facts intertwined with a number of fabricated stories about the works in the exhibition. 3. A cyanotypes workshop, run by one of the trained facilitators at the Tate, where domestic everyday objects are placed onto photographic paper and exposed to UV light. 4. An activity inspired by Lygia Clark’s work, a basic 2D net where the participant can fold and secure however they choose, creating an infinite number of 3D possibilities. We wanted the focus of the day to be looking at the surreal works on show in the gallery, and ultimately coming up with your own meanings behind them.
‘La Jetee’ by Chris Marker was a film recommended to me in a tutorial for its use of still photography. It is a story that is almost entirely narrated using black and white stills. They are layered with sound effects, music and the narrator’s voice. The story is told of the survivors of a third world war in Paris, where scientists experiment on those that retreat underground in an effort to travel in time away from the present. The story is circular, starting and ending at the same point in time. The images tell the story, with the addition of sound to define the details. The only moving image throughout the whole film is of the woman in the story waking up and looking directly at the camera, there is no sound at this point. It provides the sense of a dream-like state, where the viewer gets a glimpse into the head of the man in the film. It is a moment in the film unusual in comparison to the rest, and it felt odd to see a moving image against all of the still frames, despite knowing that a majority of films are made entirely with the moving image. It was interesting to see how a full narrative could be told using the still frames, with the real emphasis on the sounds provided. I am considering the possibility of using sound and video work to convey my ideas, but I will have to conduct more research into this to see if it would provide the desired effect. I happened to stumble upon a box of free till roll receipt paper by chance. It made my entire week as I had been furiously bidding on boxes of the stuff on ebay but to no avail. Recently I have noticed how much my work revolves around a continuous line, be it a physically drawn line or a metaphorical one that follows a path or journey. I wanted to explore this through the naturally long and thin nature of till roll paper, and now I have the rolls I have begun to experiment with its uses. I have used it as an additional line to my photojoiner; and then tracing lines of interest from the photographs across the paper. I have found that doing this has created the impression of contour lines on an illustrated map, so I now have the potential to expand on this piece and develop the lines following the shape of the original joiner. I have also been using this paper to collect thoughts. I have been finding it difficult to condense all of my thoughts and ideas into one place, so whenever I have felt lost I have been writing on the long paper.
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AuthorThird Year BA Hons Fine Art student studying at Falmouth University Archives
April 2017
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