http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 The Garden Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:24:57 +0000 a-n rss generator a-n The Artists Information Company and contributors edit@a-n.co.uk technical@a-n.co.uk http://www.a-n.co.uk/img/logo.gif http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 Culpeper Community Garden nestles behind a Sainsbury's carpark off Liverpool Road in Islington. It has a secret, secluded aspect - once inside, amongst the tall trees and networks of raised beds, you feel a long way from the commotion of central London just a few metres beyond. I was recently invited by Islington Exhibits and Cubitt Education to take up a Research Residency in the garden. It is an informal set up, I'm not obliged to make, do or present anything in particular, there is no suggested time frame, no necessary outcome. I've decided though, that it will be a twelve-month project, that I will spend one year visiting Culpeper, observing the seasonal flows and fluxes, the shifts in colour, form, light and shadow, the people that come and go, the plants and wildlife that live there. And I'll see what happens. I'd like to develop a moving image work of some kind and I'd like to keep this blog to document my progress.I've visited the garden four times so far, the first just to have a walk round and get a feel for its layout. The next few visits I brought a Sigma SLR loaded with Fugichrome Velvia slide film. I'm endlessly fascinated and seduced by projections and I often use slides as a starting point in explorations of a place. I like to incorporate projection processes into my film and video-making and with this in mind I've been shooting series of images in the garden. Focusing on a section of path, a tree, a shrub I’ve been taking a sequence of perhaps six or eight frames, moving the camera very slightly each time. Not exactly pixilation and very rough and ready, but it'll be interesting to see how they come out, the rhythms they might create, whether they will work on a timeline as (crude) animations. I am interested in capturing little moments, glimpses.I have been researching Marie Menken's work recently, particularly her 1957 film Glimpse of the Garden. I'm interested in ways she used magnifying glasses (in this and other projects) to reveal strange, ambiguous image-worlds within everyday objects around her. I'm also interested in what David Berridge calls her 'stop-start sensibility, an interest in momentum interfused with actual or potential interruption, lingering and delay’, her attention to light and shadow, to surface, to pattern...There have always been a lot of people in the garden when I’ve visited, people of all ages and from all walks of life. I like to listen to the sounds of their voices, many of which I can’t understand – there is a strong Turkish community in that part of Islington. While the garden is a protective, relaxing place it is in fact quite noisy. The constant hum of traffic, roaring planes, shouts of children from a playground nearby almost drown out the closer, quieter sounds of insects and birds, rustling leaves, footsteps and voices. I'd like to capture these sounds. I wonder how they might affect the sequential photographs I've been taking. I imagine they might change the feeling completely.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 It’s always exciting to find a package of processed slide film in the letterbox, doubly so to unwrap it and hold each strip up to the light to see how it’s come out. I’ve got 4 reels back from the lab now, so around 90 frames to play with. Last week I went through the painstaking process of scanning each image into the computer (so I can import them into Final Cut Pro and create a movie sequence). A process that more than pays off, though, when you see them playing back on the timeline: always a bit of a surprise, and always a bit magical. Even as digitized scans, the slides carry that richness and warmth that is so particular to film. It is worth the time, the expense and the few out-of-focus frames to get that quality of image. I also enjoy the delay, the anticipation between shooting and developing. It affords time to ponder and plan, to think ahead to the next phase.90 frames aren’t many, so I’ve only managed a few tentative tests so far. But I’m quite excited by the results. The series create short, stuttering journeys - little glimpses. I can loop some of the sequences to extend their rhythms. Many are close-up details of plants and flowers so capture something of the seclusion and intimacy of the garden. The sequences are erratic, playful (“kind of snapshot-y” my boyfriend said). I don’t mind that, the garden is a light-hearted, playful place. The jumpiness is unusual for me though - although I like to draw some attention to the ‘animated’ nature of my work, I usually take care to use a tripod, to eliminate wobble and to allow for smooth transitions and delicate movements rather than quick, disjunctive cuts. I’m not quite sure how this will pan out…On Thursday afternoon I made my first sound recordings. I was using a tiny microphone attached to my iPod so the recordings are faint and crackly, but I quite like that quality. They create a sense of space and suggest an environment, without spelling it out too clearly. Children’s voices drift in from a nearby playground; planes and cars are a steady drone in the background. Occasionally I captured a fly buzzing or footsteps passing by me - closer sounds that begin to define the space of the photographs, albeit ambiguously. Afterwards I sat with some of the Culpeper members and talked about seasonal changes in the garden. Already summer is dying away and the colours, textures are changing. It has been unusually dry so the grass is looking parched, many of the colourful flowers have passed and the whole place feels more subdued.  They told me how in the winter months when the green canopies are gone, the surrounding buildings become much more visible – more present in the space. It will be interesting to observe this transformation, the dialogue or interchange between garden and city.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 I attended an evening course at the LUX recently, and saw range of artists’ films from their archive: Margaret Tate’s film poems, Stan Brackhage & Carolee Schneeman’s painterly films, Kurt Kren’s structural experiments, John Smith’s witty montages. The course inspired me to try working more freely with photographs and static shots, to think differently about combining still images with moving ones, and about ways of constructing rhythms, loops, stanzas. I particularly remember Kurt Kren’s film Trees in Autumn, images of tangled, bare branches shot as single frames and appearing on the projection screen in rapid-fire succession. The silhouettes are cracks or ruptures across the screen, the flashing lines seem aggressive, violent but then you catch sight of a little bird in one of the trees. It is rhythmic, systematic but it is also natural and bodily. The images are suggestive of veins, synapses; also of shattered glass and explosions. I’ve been reading an interesting essay by Ellen Mara De Wachter that discusses Laura Buckley’s work in relation to Paul Virilio’s notion of ‘picnolepsy’. De Wachter describes flows and interruptions, staccatos and fragmentations in Buckley’s installations that ‘correspond to the conflicted nature of consciousness’. Virilio’s state of picnolepsy, induced to some extent by speed and technology, refers to the disorienting montage of our vision and hearing, the cut-up of sounds and images we are constantly receiving, negotiating. I think again of Marie Menken and her ‘stop-start sensibility’.My first animation tests seem to describe something of this staccato montage, and suggest a kind of dialogue between industry and nature. The disjunctive cuts and snap-shot rhythms are very much mechanical, processed representations of the garden. The machine is also ever-present through the hum of cars and planes in the audio recordings. On my to-do list for the next week is: shoot some more reels of slide film (possibly using a magnifying glass to look closer at plant details), order more stock, cut and mount a selection of frames from the first 4 reels and do some projection experiments. I’d like to try superimposing two or more slides from a series – to combine multiple views of the same scene in a different kind of montage…... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 Today I went to the Stephen Friedman Gallery to see work by the four artists shortlisted for the Dazed & Confused Emerging Artists Award – one of whom is Laura Buckley.Buckley is showing a new installation, KZN, in which a video loop is projected through a suspended and rotating hexagonal prism. As it spins, the prism reflects fragments of the video image around the room while at the same time casting a heavy geometric shadow over the main projection image. The video appears to be shot on a hand-held camera as the artist walks through domestic gardens and industrial landscapes. She explores patterns of light and shade in tree canopies and on tarmac pathways. Obscured glass windows abstract objects into hazy, honey-coloured shapes. The picture is constantly being redefined, cut-up, repeated and eclipsed by the Perspex prism, which has quite a weighty presence in the gallery space. No attempt is made to hide the apparatus of Buckley’s experiment (the huge installation projector, the large wooden plinth, the chunky speaker), rather our attention seems deliberately drawn to it, to her process of investigation and play.Snippets of children’s voices filter through the electronic sounds from the speaker; a child’s hand appears in the video to spin a metal object for the camera. Full of primary colours and dancing shapes, the work is like an exploded computer game, a digital mobile. Secondary reflections and refractions bounce off the hanging prism and travel around the room. I’m reminded of Peter Campus’s closed circuit camera installations. But unlike Campus’s works, interaction with the apparatus is not invited. In fact it wasn’t easy to approach the prism at all, the light was blindingly bright. Better I found to sit down on the floor and look up, as if from a child’s perspective in fact, at the kaleidoscope above and around me.(I remember the children’s voices that drifted into my audio recordings in the garden, and think about what effect they have on the imagery.)I was excited to discover that the winning artist Peter Ainsworth’s mysterious, beautiful photographs were shot in his father’s garden in London. In his introduction to the project he describes the domestic garden as being a ‘controlled and contrived space, one that often has ambiguous states.’ He refers to Tate’s 2004 exhibition The Art of the Garden, which unfortunately I didn’t see. There is some archived text on their website though, which is interesting to read:“With an increasingly concentrated urban population, many people have become more distanced from nature, and a private garden space is an ever more precious asset. The idea of the garden remains strong in the popular consciousness, but for many it is precisely this - an idea.
The garden’s metaphorical associations grow more ambiguous and more extreme. For many contemporary artists it is still a site for reverie and imaginative potential, but it also stands for a lost world, a place that is neglected, interfered with and under threat. To some, the garden reveals in microcosm what has happened to nature as a whole; controlled, cultivated, and encroached. The contemporary garden is one of extremes, where much is imagined and idealized, and imperfections and contrivances are celebrated: still perhaps an ‘arcadia’, if an unlikely one.”This evening I did some projection tests with a few mounted slides. As soon as I switched the projectors on, the difference between the film images and my digitized scans became hugely apparent – the colours have that lovely, warm tint that had been ‘corrected’ by the computer, the picture is speckled by dust and hairs caught on the lens, textures of the wall merge with and become part of the photograph. And that amazing moment when the projector is turned on or off, the image slowly emerging or dissolving away into nothing.I tried overlaying two slides from adjacent projectors, exploring the resulting patterns and double exposures. By moving my hand across one or other of the lenses I control how much of the image shines through. This might be an interesting way to generate animation sequences...... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 While on holiday in Portugal last week, my boyfriend and I found ourselves seeking shelter from the baking heat and bustling crowds in Porto’s Crystal Palace Gardens. The sense of relief was immediate as we passed through the gates into the cool shade of the trees, as we walked alongside calming fountains and carefully laid flowerbeds. I thought about this impulse to escape the noise, confusion and tarmac-heat of the city. And how ‘natural’ spaces are invariably introduced to city plans as if to provide a respite from work/life/society. While I was away I listened to some recordings of Tate’s 2008 conference ‘The New Conceptualist Garden’, in which landscape designers such as Monika Gora and Eelco Hooftman spoke about their practice. They discussed some of the tensions and paradoxes inherent in the idea of the garden, relationships between the man-made and the natural, between the artificial and the real. Here are some of the notes I made: *Gardens are for people*No man-made space can be natural*Gardens are enclosures containing a protected ‘otherness’*Gardens have defined boundaries*Gardens are framed spaces I’ve also been re-reading some Walter Benjamin essays, including 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. I love his words on close-ups and enlargements, and on what he describes as the optical unconscious:“... just as enlargement is not really concerned with simply clarifying what we glimpse ‘anyway’ but rather brings out wholly new structural formations in matter, neither does the slow-motion technique simply bring out familiar movement motifs but reveals in them others that are quite unfamiliar ...Palpably then, this is a different nature that addresses the camera than the one that speaks to the eye ...”I think back to my slides - the 'framed space' of Culpeper being re-framed by the camera lens; close-up and time-lapse shots revealing a 'different nature' from an already 'unnatural' space. I plan to shoot another roll on Friday, rain or no rain!... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 I spent an evening with my slide projectors this week, combining frames from my June/July shoots to create double exposure effects. Turning one bulb on and then the another, I thought about the differences between single and overlaid compositions, the way the quiet portraits of the individual shots are transformed into kind of noisy, more complicated images when a new layer is added. Where two slides overlap and combine, new forms are suggested and new associations are formed. There is a sense of ambiguity and changefulness in the composite image, a hint of movement almost. I love that film projections are not quite static, that they have a fragile, hovering quality: they can and might disappear at any moment. These double-images seem to heighten that sense of suspension, they are in-between two moments, an amalgam, a fiction. While I have tried to combine the two layers subtly, masking out sections of one or other frame so that the double-image is not overpowering, there is still a sense of disjunction and a knowledge that the scenes have been assembled, constructed. Like Fischli & Weiss’s Projection 4 (P), 1997, where double-exposed slides of mushrooms and other plants are projected over each other to create huge and dissolving composite scenes. A little more psychedelic than my experiments, but nevertheless interesting to compare: "The translucency of the slide images only adds to the confusing morass of curvilinear forms that never quite reach a comfortable zone of complete abstraction. Each plant form represented is never whole or autonomous; even if a viewer tries to freeze one for a moment, it quickly becomes something else." (from Slide Show, Darsie Alexander, Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005, pp. 99-100)I went to Culpeper on Saturday morning, a nice time to visit as there weren’t many people around. After all the rain the garden was looking lush and green. I took a couple of rolls of slide film, focussing on a carefully planted vegetable patch, whose rows of what I think are onions and kale are framed by strings of white paper markers. I also shot about 30 feet of super 8 film. Inspired by the idea of the seasonal exchange between garden and city, one potentially giving way to the other as the environmental conditions change, I’ve started looking at the buildings that surround the garden walls. At the moment the foliage is dense, and the houses, windows, architectural details are just snippets glimpsed (or glimpsing) through the green. But as the winter draws on and the leaves fall, I imagine the city will become much more visible, more present in the space.The camera, a Canon AZ 814, was given to me by my mum’s ex-boyfriend, who used it when he was an art student in the 80’s. I’ve only used it in two or three projects, and am still a bit tentative handling it. But it is such a pleasure to hear it ticking away, to watch the counter turn; the stock feels quite precious and I enjoy the nervous excitement of not knowing how and if it will have come out. The eyepiece and viewfinder seem very small compared to my SLR and my digital cameras, and I really have to squint hard to get the focus right. The lens transforms the colours and texture of the garden around me - the prism-screen shading the scene in a kind of grainy-grey, parts of the frame given a kind of reddish tint where, I guess, the lens has aged. As I peer down into the body of the camera, the scene already feels quite ‘other’ to the actual landscape in front of me, it is framed, extracted and transformed.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 I went to Nettie Horn this week to see Sinter Werner’s latest show, Along the Sight Lines. I’ve been following Werner’s practice for a while now; she makes site-specific installations, collages, large-format slides and photo prints that explore the unstable, illusory experience of perception. Standing in front of her pieces feels a bit like looking through one eye and then the other and seeing the scene in front of you jump. My favourite piece in this show was a photo-collage, Milos IV (2010): Two black and white photographs showing a gnarly island rock are layered one on top of the other and box-framed. Following the lines of the rock’s nooks and crannies, Werner has carefully cut small shapes from the top layer to reveal the second image underneath, which is slightly out of focus. It is a subtle intervention, but enough to recall something of a 3D experience – that of peering through the holes and cavities in an actual rock face to the mysterious (fuzzy) darkness within. It’s interesting that, while the differently focused layers do create a kind of illusion of depth, the collage calls more attention to the very flatness of the photographs, and the dimensionality/physicality that they lack. Talking to Paul Carey-Kent, Werner says of her practice: “It points up how you can’t really trust anything you perceive … there is not one truth, everything is subjective and changing all the time. And the world is mediated through 2D media, which you come to rely on.” In the same conversation, she references Foucault’s 1967 lecture ‘Different Spaces’ and his idea of ‘heterotopias’ - alternative spaces that bring together within one actual place, various relations of proximity (emplacements) that seem incompatible in themselves. Like theatre and cinema auditoria, and like gardens. “ … the theatre brings onto the rectangle of the stage a whole succession of places that are unrelated to one another; in the same way, the cinema is a very curious rectangular hall at the back of which one sees a three-dimensional space projected onto a two-dimensional screen; but perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias, in the form of contradictory emplacements, is the garden … The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that is said to have joined together within its rectangle four parts representing four parts of the world, with a space even more sacred than the others which was like the umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (this was the location of the basin and the fountain); and all the garden’s vegetation was supposed to be distributed within that space, within that figurative microcosm.”I remember that Peter Ainsworth described his father’s garden as a stage for his photography.It is interesting that some of my newest slides have come back looking rather like an animation set – the lines of white paper flags demarcating the vegetable patch resemble miniature strings of bunting, and set up a curious sense of scale against the shoots and leaves.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 "Gardens have always attracted me because they are great artificial projects. Decorations, gazebos, rose beds, hedges and greenhouses never change. Greenhouses especially are a sort of sacred place..." - Artist Flavio FavelliThese last couple of weeks have been all about glass. Bubbles and glass. I’ve had a show at UCL, London (www.pattern-completion.net) so haven't had so much time to spend on my Garden project. But I’m happy to be back in my workroom today, with plenty of reading, writing, scanning, thinking and projecting to do.I went to the BFI on Wednesday to watch František Vláčil’s short film Glass Skies. I discovered Vláčil’s work only recently, but was struck by his poetic approach to filmmaking. This piece tells the story of a boy’s fascination with the sky. We see him playing in his grandfather’s greenhouse, a model bird he sends soaring over the glass roofs breaking one of the panes. The boy runs away from the garden, to discover an airplane parked in a nearby field. He climbs into the cockpit and imagines taking off. Throughout the film, characters and objects are viewed through panes of glass, as reflections in mirrors or distortions in shiny aircraft-parts. Obscured-glass panels of the greenhouse transform figures into abstract blocks of colour; raindrops falling onto clear glass panes blot out the scene beyond; pools of water in the garden create rippling images and reflections. On one level a poetic reverie on flight and light, the film has ominous overtones - the story implies a plane crash involving the boy’s father. The microcosm of the greenhouse, presented as an unreal place of mirage and magic, echoes the dangers of the outside/real world beyond.Again, I’m reminded of the idea of the garden as a microcosm; and of the relationship between gardens, childhood and play.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 After what felt like a long time away, I visited Culpeper the other day to take a new batch of 35mm slides. It certainly feels autumnal now: bright and blustery, the colours are changing to darker greens, reds, oranges. Berries were falling around me as I walked under the canopies (it was a particularly windy afternoon) and the paths were littered with leaves. I tried to explore a new area of the garden this time - the southwest corner near the compost heap - but I was quite uncertain as to what to shoot. I've been photographing in a rather haphazard, random way so far – simply responding to what I’m seeing/finding, capturing 'little moments' in a stop-start kind of way, without thinking ahead to how sequences will come together on a timeline. I realised I needed to look back over the images and shots I've already collated, to consider the sequences and patterns that are starting to form. I went back to Final Cut Pro and exported a rough edit of just over a minute's worth of scanned photographs. I set it playing in a continuous loop on my desktop and wrote some notes:*Walking around, changes announced by the soundtrack*Black spaces can be useful - pauses*Difference between slow and fast sequences is like the difference between walking and running?*Would be nice to see/hear different weather conditions – rain*Pathways and walking – navigating the space, exploring*Close-up explorations*The dark (underexposed) section looks like twilight and gives a very different feelingThis sense of walking is something I'd like to investigate further. And the differences between stopping to look and being on the move.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 I cut short a rather overwhelming visit to Frieze last Thursday to collect some digitised Super 8 rushes from Sendean Cameras – one reel from the garden, one reel of test shots for another project in development Hagspiel & Comp. I'd peeped at the filmstrip before handing it in for the Telecine – the coiling thread of mysterious, miniature images – and was waiting in anticipation for the video version. The guys at Sendean had warned me my camera was in need of a service, having never been calibrated to take alkaline rather than mercury batteries. And unfortunately much of the garden footage did come out rather murky and dull. The more successful shots are those looking over the trees and bushes to the buildings surrounding the garden walls – the stronger lines of the architecture lend some structure and definition to the frame. I’ve been thinking to use these clips to make a new ‘bubble’ installation, one that might be a sequel to my 2009 piece Fedora, which also explored ideas of shifting cities. The footage of course has that very specific 8mm quality, which I’m not entirely sure how to deal with. I love the grainy-ness and the imprecision of the wavering image. But I’m not aiming to create a wistful or nostalgic piece, or one that has anything to do with home movies or obsolete technologies. So why use the film stock? It’s certainly not the easiest or most economical choice. One reason might be to try and capture this sense of ‘otherness’ that is characteristic of the garden. The unreality, the artificiality, the imaginary nature of the space. The film footage has a far-away, nebulous quality so unlike the close-up-super-HD-clarity of the digital image world. A construction vehicle driving past seems incongruous in this far-away space, gives a jolt – disrupts the apparent softness of the scene as a reminder of the actuality of the city.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 Listening to a podcast of Tate’s 2009 Symposium Urban Encounters: Rethinking Landscape, I heard Susan Trangmar presenting 'A Play in Time', a 2-channel video installation shot in a public park in Hove. Trangmar explains how, in this and in other projects, she has explored relationships between "a phenomenological experience of space, the cultural constitution of place and the lived practices of space, which take place on site". I found her articulation of these relationships very interesting, and they've helped re-frame some of the ideas I've been exploring at Culpeper. Particularly interesting were her thoughts on aspects of 'public' and 'private' within urban spaces – the idea that community gardens are collectively shared, but also places for the individual to pause and reflect. She talks about the balance between sociality and solitude in parks, 'where imaginative space mingles with public space'. I often feel conspicuous when filming and photographing in the garden - laden down with bags and cases, my tripod mounted precariously across narrow footpaths or between benches. Culpeper is quite a contained, compact space, and while it is easy to lose oneself (psychologically, imaginatively) within the seclusion of the bushes and trees, there is little possibility of physically escaping or actually being concealed. Trangmar talks of embracing the performative aspect of her shooting - making herself clearly visible so that her role as observer is as important in the 'performance' of the piece as that of the people around her whose activities the camera is capturing. This led to interesting discussions on the changing relationships between lens and subject in a country where people are almost continually under surveillance - the growing paranoia of a public who are aware of always being watched. Trangmar voices her concern that the increasing privatisation – and so protection and surveillance – of space is affecting our ability to relate or interact with others. So far I've not photographed any of the people I’ve met or passed by in the garden, but I've been thinking more about the importance of their presence within my audio recordings, if I am to explore these interrelationships between culture and nature, between sociality and solitude. I've not had an opportunity to visit Culpeper for a few weeks now – I'm eager to find out whether more leaves have fallen, whether the branches are more bare – and, crucially, whether the buildings are becoming more visible around the perimeter fence... I have done some tests with my Super 8 footage this week though – projecting it into a suspended glass sphere, to see if my ideas about microcosms could be explored in a new 'bubble' installation.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 "I only need to step into the small alley in the garden, stroll between the green hills and blue waters, and in an instant, I would feel as if the cacophony outside is of no concern to me. I vanish within the middle of the garden, just as the world disappears into the garden." - Garden of Mirrored Flowers, Hu Fang, 2010. I was talking to a work colleague last week about my project at Culpeper. She lives near the garden and knows it well. She pointed out a fundamental characteristic of the site that I’d not considered before: that it is sunken into the landscape and that in order to enter from the street you have to descend – either via stairs or down a sloping pathway – into the space. The pathways and beds are layered, segmented by little stone walls and steps so that you are often walking up and down, moving higher or lower – but it is true that the perimeter fence always rises up around you; looking outwards from the centre of the garden to the buildings around is to look upwards and outwards. I’ve been working with my double-exposure images this week, thinking about ways to develop them into a screen-based piece. Compared to the sequences of scanned slides – which give a stuttering but fairly straightforward representation of the site – the overlaid projections give a more complex expression, a grainy, patchwork video collage. Zooming in on small details is exciting too – shapes and patterns become more abstract, more evocative. The images I’ve been testing weren’t made with any kind of sequencing in mind so changes between frames are erratic and random. But nevertheless some sense of movement is suggested as details in one or other image recede or advance in the picture. I will try out some more thoughtful tests – masking out details gradually, progressively, so that transitions are smoother and longer.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 My first day back to work. 'Place', an 'exhibition in a book' by Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar often helps me re-focus after time away. Dean and Mililar’s synopsis of A K Dolven's project looking back describes the complex, reciprocal relationships between our sense of identity and our understanding of the natural world. But how are these relationships complicated when the 'nature' around us is understood to be artificial, prescribed, constructed? (I have recently read 'The Garden of Mirrored Flowers' by Hu Fang, a dreamy novel that follows an architect as he designs a theme park for a new Chinese city, inspired by online computer games and classical literature including the Quing Dynasty novel 'Flowers in the Mirror'. A disorienting read, it is hard to navigate the layers of fictional spaces, imaginary walkways, dream gardens.) A few pages on are images of Roni Horn's Becoming a Landscape, and text exploring relationships between the body and its surroundings: 'In stating that "the view is not separate from the viewer", Horn recognizes one of the most important relationships in an understanding of place within contemporary art: a desire to re-enact the land with meaning, or to examine that area of overlap and coincidence between inner and outer spaces.' "When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place," says geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. A sense of place grows through familiarity, through processes of acquaintance? I begin scanning my 100+ new slides of Culpeper (which arrived from the lab just before Christmas) and consider this particular process of acquaintance – which is meticulous, repetitious; it involves examining, capturing, fragmenting and re-combining tiny details of a place to establish new relationships with it. I really enjoyed A K Dolven's show at Wilkinson last year, especially her video installation selfportrait Berlin februar 1989 Lofoten august 2009. It is evocative and giddy, it describes the sensation of being in a space and also inside your body. I loved its textural quality too, the colours and the grain – these qualities keep coming to mind as I plan my double-exposure animation sequences of the garden.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 Stills from my new animation sequences. I’ve found myself zooming into tiny portions of the frames - to exaggerate the soft, grainy texture of the projections and to abstract the imagery as much as possible. I think of Karl Blossfeldt’s enlargements and a newspaper article on his photobook Urformen der Kunst, which I picked up at a Melanie Jackson show last year: "Blossfeldt’s photographic images allow exploration in an estranged, though once familiar, landscape: 'We, the observers, wander amid these giant plants like Lilliputions'. The camera routes vision through the machine and so detaches humans from their conscious or habitual modes of seeing. Habit desensitizes us to what is seen. Jolted seeing returns us, as the Russian Formalists insisted, to perception." The article quotes Walter Benjamin's 'Selected Writings, Volume 2.1'.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 ' ... enlargement is not really concerned with simply clarifying what we glimpse 'anyway' but rather brings out wholly new structural formations in matter ... ' - Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction I went to the Wellcome Collection last week to see Aura Satz’s Sound Seam. The work was made during a residency at the UCL Ear Institute and explores aspects of memory, sound and hearing. Recordings made within the inner ear, gramophone needles grating over coronal bone, echoing voices and more combine in an elaborate, multi-layered soundtrack. For me though, the visuals were more compelling – microscopic photographs of the cochlea created strange, organic spirals; close-ups of gramophones and record grooves made pulsing abstract patterns. The images were textural, suggestive, unexpected. They seemed to be images or perspectives I hadn’t encountered before, which was exciting. I’ve since discovered some of Samantha Rebello’s short films online, including Outer Castings of a Few Small Creatures, a rich, tactile film of close-ups of natural armours: a snail’s shell, a crab, cracked eggs. Through her camera, Rebello renders these animals/objects strange, unfamiliar, almost new.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 GLIMPSES STOP-START BRIEFLY * I have begun reading The Garden in the Machine by Scott MacDonald, which explores representations of nature and landscape (often gardens specifically) in American avant-garde film. Many of the individual studies (of Larry Gottheim's Fog Line, Babette Mangolte's The Sky on Location for example) draw attention to the conflict between images of nature/wilderness and the equipment required to capture them: the idea that any photographic depiction is by definition a technological construction. MacDonald writes of the 'grid' that development has imposed on natural process, which is referenced in Gottheim's films through electricity lines, fences etc. that divide and measure his frame as they divide and measure the landscape he explores. 'Gottheim was quite well aware that the “natural world” was visible at most through the interstices of the layers of technology within which we live.' (p.41) Grids and divisions have been important ideas in another video study I am developing (Hoad Hill), which uses glass and mirrors to fracture and re-construct images of a hillside in Cumbria. MacDonald writes of Fog Line: 'the lines within and around this image mitigate against our penetration of the space and draw our attention to the graphic make-up of the frame ... To the extent that we do see and measure the scene before us ... we realize that we are seeing not Nature but photography’s transformation of it.' Glimpse of the Garden also features in MacDonald's study: Menken's use of close-up, her hand-held camera, her sweeping gestures. The way her film acts as a catalogue of ways 'in which a camera can glimpse'. I am excited to think of my slide-animation piece as dealing with the act of 'glimpsing': that is 'to see or perceive briefly', 'a momentary or partial view'.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 Today bright sunshine. And a trip to the garden, my first this year and since the snow. It is mostly brown bare branches, snapped or broken by the wind, limp leaves, crumpled, dried pods. And cool, damp earth. But occasionally the pink hint of a new bud, a rustle of a bird in the bushes, green grasses.I took a reel of slide film, this time with the 'glimpses' piece very much in mind. Looking for forms and compositions that might make similar patterns to the vertical colour-bands of the poppy stalks - or stand out like the thorny rose-stems - when projected, overlaid and zoomed in on. It's reassuring to have that process to guide me and I can be more selective with my shots.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 The theme of my evening class at the LUX this week was landscape. In her introduction Lucy reminded us that the notion of 'landscape' only really emerged with industrialisation – at the moment when people first felt themselves divorced/separate from nature. This echoes MacDonald's writing in The Garden in the Machine, and makes the 'dialogue' between industry and nature, between garden and city that I have been referring to seem all the more poignant. We watched films by Brackhage, Bruce Baillie, Margaret Tait and others, artists who have worked in opposition to the mainstream film industry, dealing with landscape not simply as a backdrop, a sweeping panorama that lies 'behind' the action of the film, but as a subject or experience in itself. They use movement, close-up, abstraction and other techniques to get away from the 'polite image' of a framed landscape that is so distinct from the complex, phenomenological experience of being in nature. I was particularly interested in Bruce Baillie’s use of close-up. We watched reels 41, 43, 46 and 47 of Quick Billy. In the more obscure and disorienting sections, the camera is held close to Baillie’s body as he walks, falteringly, exploring his surroundings. In more considered pans, close-up views of household objects become landscapes of their own, as textural and stratiform as sections of rock. As with Samantha Rebello’s works, domestic objects are rendered unfamiliar, and we are invited to look closely and see the world anew. In Aerial, Margaret Tait presents a poetic (though non-sentimental) study of her garden. An earthworm follows a dead bird follows fallen blossom in her chain of images. (Glimpses?) In her own words: "air, water (and snow), earth, fire (and smoke), all come into it." We watched more systematic pieces as well, by Chris Welsby, William Raban and Malcolm LeGrice. The copy of Whitchurch Down that we watched was quite worn – a secondary grid of vertical scratch lines gradually being imposed on the frame... * I went to see a small photography exhibition this afternoon: 'Exploration and Intervention: New Landscape Photography' at George and Jorgen. There were two Peter Ainsworth pieces from his 'Drowned World' series. Not really micro investigations but nevertheless there seemed to be a connection to the close-up films I’ve been thinking about. Sections of urban environments are defamiliarised in images of cobwebbed breeze-blocks or dank canal sides; tide-marks on concrete create fictitious horizon lines and all sense of scale is confused.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 I presented an 'in progress' version of my slide animation at Last Friday Shorts in Southend last week. I'd spent some time before the screening expanding my 50-second edit to allow a lingering over what I realised were in many cases exceptionally brief, barely perceptible images. The resulting cut, almost 90 seconds long, is smoother and 'quieter' in many places, with gradual fades between shots - swells and blends that help to counter the flickering stop-start of the animated moments. It is probably still a little fast - on the big screen the shots of thorns were surprisingly agitated, violent almost. Feedback from the screening was interesting: people commented on the closeness, the intimacy of the imagery (someone even mentioned voyeurism). And the separateness of the viewpoint: against the faraway sounds of children playing and the traffic hum, the viewer seems distanced and solitary. This reminded me of Susan Trangmar's discussion of sociality versus solitude in shared urban spaces and seems an important aspect of the piece.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 Axel Antas: NEW TO NATURE at Rokeby Gallery, London.Exploring relationships between landscape and technology, nature and artifice » * Chris Welsby on TECHNOLOGY AND LANDSCAPE "In my single screen films and single channel videos the mechanics of film and video interact with the landscape in such a way that elemental processes — such as changes in light, the rise and fall of the tide or changes in wind direction — are given the space and time to participate in the process of representation. The resulting sequences of images make it possible to envisage a relationship between technology and nature based on principles other than exploitation and domination."The gallery installations deal with the transformations which occur when the non-Euclidean space of the landscape is imported into an architectural space based on the rules of geometry and perspective. The dimensions of the gallery, the size and scale of the image, the proportions of the video monitor or projection screen, the positioning of the monitors or screens, are primary considerations, and central to the meaning of the work. The fragmentation of image and sound, which characterises these installations, acknowledges the split between culture and nature but, at the same time, opens up the possibility of a less dualistic reading." www.sfu.ca/~welsby/Intro.htm... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 MINIATURE "The botanist's magnifying glass is youth recaptured. It gives him back the enlarging gaze of a child. With this glass in his hand, he returns to the garden où les enfants regardent grand(where children see enlarged) Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world which, like all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness. Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness."- Bachelard, The Poetics of Space * In The General Returns from One Place to Another by Michael Robinson, close-up shots of plants and flowers are mesmerising, seductive and deeply sinister. Rumbling bass and sounds of guns firing work with the repeating (truncated) pans to warn us away.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 A process of acquaintance, which is meticulous, repetitious; which involves examining, capturing, enlarging and re-combining tiny details of a place to establish new relationships with it. During the projection and re-photographing process my tripod is positioned as close to the projectors as possible and I am behind the apparatus, using a remote control to trigger the shutter. I look for interesting overlays, I use my hands to obstruct or reveal portions of each image and I move towards the projection to see how the light merges with the paint on the wall, but I am distanced from the moment of capture and I don't really discover what the camera has recorded (the level of detail, the textures, the patterns) until I take the photographs into the computer and enlarge them. A yo-yoing of relations: I look closely to take the initial photo, then I step back – the projector and camera stand between me and the image and the process is opened up – then I come back in and look closer again, carefully selecting parts of this new, mechanically constructed image. In 1946, Maya Deren described the camera as an instrument 'which can function, simultaneously, both in terms of discovery and invention ... the direct contact between camera and reality results in a quality of observation which is quite different from that of the human being.' (Maya Deren: An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film) She goes on to discuss the beauty and excitement of photographic close-ups of ocean organisms, plant sections etc. taken (discovered) by scientists through microscopic observation.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399 "Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles ... The camera makes reality atomic." - Sonntag, On Photography, 1977 Generating video sequences from my slide photographs – the 'animation' does not create an illusion of movement; it doesn't disguise or conceal the still images that it is composed of. Attention is drawn to the individual units (each photo) that make up the flow and the relationships / differences between them. Somewhere between stillness and movement. The individual images (particles) are abstractions of my original experience of the garden. Glimpses enlarged, concentrated, expanded. It is not what I see, but what I see affected by optical, mechanical, chemical and digital processes that create complex new images that describe something other, something more.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/653399