films!




in the summer i made two short films which i have mentioned before. although they are both still in sketch format and not in their final edit i have decided to upload them now to my blog (via a youtube channel which i have created today). i want to share them, and i hope by doing so to move on with my film work - to mark the place as it were - and proceed from this point.

recent work in the studio has been a combination of close analysis of my photographic images (for content and  narrative sparks). organisational activities like getting my photo archive in order and some experimental try outs making use of the wall space in the studio to make some loose collages using objects which i collected (and used last year in installations) and found and original images. what i have discovered is, that what i really want, is to use this collage gesture in the making of a film. materiality is very important to me, the real sensory experience of things, their shape, their colour, their sounds, their texture and i think i can make this tendency i have to be closely aware of the material quality of things to come through with film media.

yesterday before going to sleep i read an excellent short essay by the English poet Ted Hughes called 'Words and Experience', in a short book he wrote in 1967 called Poetry in the Making', on the experience of life in relation to poetry.  another book called 'Don't Ask Me What I Mean' edited by Clare Brown and Don Paterson has helped me to realise that the way i create my work is very similar to the descriptions poets give of their writing process. time and again, poets say that words have their own life, their own intentions, that 'the poem allowed the poet to discover it much as a water diviner is permitted to come upon water'. this theme repeats itself in the contributions from appox 100 poets in this book. what interests me is that somehow, with poetry, this is accepted as a process, whereas in visual art when i say the same thing, that i want my images and objects to have their own voice, for the intentions to arise from them, people look at me funny and say ' but no.... but of course you are the one deciding', i dont feel like that.

what i didn't realise before now is that there is a big possibility for me to make visual poems.

this is what i want to continue with.

in the studio

i am playing in the studio with how to present the combinations of things i am working on. recently i rearranged the space so that i have two big walls to lay things out on. there are hints of narrative which develop by putting images and objects together in this way.


 

 

 

 



photography - groupings and analysis

a few weeks back i went through all my photographs ( mostly 6 x 4 prints) taken since i was given my first camera, (a Pentax K1000 when i was eighteen - been through a few different ones since then though) for the purposes of trying to reflect on the types of things that i have photographed, and what has kept my interest over the years. Here are some of the groupings i made from the collection, they are things that i thought belonged together. i realised whilst doing this that some of the most interesting images to me were ones with some kind of absence - empty washing lines, close ups of hands/feet, objects isolated from their environment.

don't look away.