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.