echo_ohce

spring portfolio

don't look away.

skimming, the start, new work

she is an amazing old bird my granny and as it turns out she took quite a number of photographs. when she moved house last year she passed on a big bag of slides. i went through them and picked out some images to work with. there were alot of touristy ones, alot of religious ones; i chose the images which gave me a jump, or an echo of something else.

of course, being me, this was all done on an intuitive level but i think each image led me to a question. or several. it has got me thinking about the photograph as a cipher; that within each image there are numerous codes to be understood, or not understood. because i still don't feel comfortable with photographic prints any larger than 7 x 5 i am continuing to use photography in a multi-disciplinary way; as a tool for writing, for ways of getting into ideas for moving image, attempting to get away from the photograph as image only, and away from its association with painting (in terms of it's material value, not in terms of image making in general) 

at the same time that i was looking through my granny's slides i was cataloging all the video that i made during my master study, in particular re-visiting some experiments where i played with a moving object over the top of a still image, there is a strange tension which i noticed in these works, a combination of a kind of giddy looseness with a static view, which is a result i think of the combination, within the frame, of still and moving image. so it became my starting point to explore more this tension between still and moving image, which has lead me first of all to the images above, which are a combination of slides with layers of notes, texts and drawings lifted from my collection of sketchbooks. i want to work on some videos using the slides as a background, with me playing with objects moving over the top. these works are an interim phase i think, they give me a key to the sort of object forms i could use, and i like the idea of a drawn element appearing within the time-frame at certain points.

i have been thinking about the activities i am doing; lifting. transferring, skimming. and to what extent does a photograph skim by it's nature, both conceptually and materially.

don't look away.

wordslips part 1

 

real life

don't look away.

news from the north

after quite a bit of time without a studio space and wondering where the hell in the world to put myself for a while whilst i work out what to do next, and develop some studio work, i am writing from my new studio, in Edinburgh, Scotland. I grew up in Edinburgh from the age of 8 so it is familiar to me, but quite alot has changed (for the better) and quite alot has stayed the same (for the worse) - for instance - there are still so many homeless people on the city streets; it doesn't matter to me whether these people are genuinely homeless or not (which is an argument people always give), what matters is that in a capital city there are so many people sitting out in the cold needing money and shelter.

my new studio is with the nice folk at Rhubaba

http://www.rhubaba.org/

follow the link to see the group and the kinds of things happening here. it is great to have found a space where there are people doing interesting things. i haven't got settled here just yet, but im hoping it won't take long to turn the studio into a dinda zone once i've picked up some of my (many) things.

i went to an seminar / talk yesterday at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh called Work/Table: Thinking Through Making (in reference to the current exhibition by Massimo Bartolini.)

http://fruitmarket.co.uk/exhibitions/current/

there were a few of points of discussion which i found really interesting:
 - incidents/accidents/events - the idea of there being different modalities of participation and engagement (in a way, both for the artist and the audience).
- objects as/and language  - the idea of objects having an implicit or explicit voice; and the lexicology of an artists' objects.
- play as a transition activity.

more news soon and some pictures of the studio when it's all up and running. once i've got a job (if anyone hears of anything art related around Edinburgh keep me in mind!) and a flat, visits from afar are really welcome, Edinburgh is a little bit like Groningen - there is always something good going on.

don't look away.

this is how she could be

sit here while i comb your hair with my new small kent comb.
(it's so beautiful this comb but really it means nothing)
this is how she could be. she / i. you.
distance between the two.

scruffy essentially, despite attempts at the opposite.
a bag. a book. what intrudes on the everyday; (?) an event, a thought, passive occurences.
balance between active and passive
in relation to she / he / i / you

small piles of ash
traces of act(s)
a fucked up polaroid of a party
it's not dated.

action/in place/object.
hands open a blue purse, the zip is gold.
the hands close it again and open it again.
what is the smile like? what is the laugh like?

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don't look away.

island winter garden

don't look away.

(british) island notes dec / jan

there is a bright stripe in the pale winter sky.
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this is you, this is your hand. this is the room. here, with this cold dry light, with the melancholic mix of the old accordion. me painted black, my body flaking, eyes shining half white, half black.

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no disruptions to your story, or maybe they are not visible, did you patch them up? mine's all broken up like a plate of spaghetti.

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'By the window of a small, darkened room Father lay on the floor, dressed in white, and looking terribly long. His feet were bare and his toes were strangely splayed out. His gentle fingers, now peacefully resting on his chest, were also distorted, and the black discs of copper coins firmly sealed his once shining eyes. His kind face had darkened and its nastily bared teeth frightened me.'
(first paragraph of My Childhood by Gorky)

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'To edit your life is to save it, for fiction, for yourself. Being identified with your life as others see it may mean that you come eventually to see it that way, too. This can only be a hindrance to memory (and, presumably, to invention).
There is more freedom to be elliptical and to abridge when the memories are not set down in chronological order. The memories - fragments of memories, transformed - emerge as chains of luxuriant notations that wind around, and conceal, the kernel of story.'
(from Where The Stress Falls by Susan Sontag)
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story - i want to work out my way of story building.
metaphors for story structures -  house of cards, jigsaw puzzle, mosiac.

don't look away.

white balloon / ride home / red flag...(glitchy videos)

on the same device (i love the word device) with which i have been taking photographs (discussed just recently on here) i also made the videos below. the quality is terrible but there is something about that which i like. the image is so pixelated in some cases that parts of it actually seem to disappear. i was thinking what it would be like to make a video which erases itself gradually.
don't look away.

p o n d l i f e

   

 

don't look away.

dailies

i want to start a daily image blog but for now here are some recent images which i have taken round my postal delivery route here in Groningen. recently i have been using my mobile phone (which is an old sony which incidentally has a nice lens on it) to take photographs, there is something satisfying about a device as small as a phone being able to handle images taken on the hop. i made some images about the same time last year and notice the autumn dampness which comes out on the photographs, somehow making the colours all the more vivid.

don't look away.

notes / oct

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watching the sky change from turquoise vibrant blue to indigo purple.
is it possible to capture these blues and the light leaking from them slowly?

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'improbable embroideries'
from Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

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forms and formulas...
thinking about film-making and certain actions (for example writing a letter) and how formal things can become, how simple actions contain so many codes, how clear you have to be in the making of the scene. and then thinking about formulas - strategies i suppose for setting up scenes or types of settings and situations. which then comes back in a circle to form (palette, choice of objects, type of action etc). everything becomes very minute, very particular. like painting, nothing should be superfluous (unless on purpose).

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'This is where I learned that sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.'
from Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

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i like a city that, on a clear night, you can still see the stars