ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [3 November 2008]

Juliet Chenery-Robson 

It is estimated that there are at least 250,000 people in the UK suffering with the chronic, disabling illness Myalgic Encephalopathy or ME as it has become known.  All types of people at all ages are affected with symptoms that include severe and debilitating fatigue, painful muscles and joints, disordered sleep, gastric disturbances, poor memory and concentration, depression, and sometimes even death.  Seen, not just as an ‘invisible’ illness as regards its myriad of internal symptoms, ME is also often regarded by the general public and many medics as ‘invisible’ because they do not believe in its existence.  The cause is unknown and as yet there is no cure. 
 

When my daughter, Emilia, became ill with ME four years ago I found myself cast as a traveler between two worlds, worlds that are eloquently described by Susan Sontag in her book Illness as Metaphor: 

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.  Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.  Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. 

Residing in the world of the well I felt assuaged with guilt at not being able to offer Emilia any firm answers to her questions as to why she was trapped in the land of the sick: “Why do I feel like this? Why is this happening to me? Why can’t you give me anything to make me better?”  So, in search of solutions I trawled the Internet, read medical books and dragged Emilia in front of a plethora of disbelieving doctors, before finally finding direction from a local charity (ME North East) and a tangible diagnosis of ME from an understanding and empathetic consultant. But this is also when I truly discovered what it must be like for residents of the ‘sick’ world, and especially for those who reside in that strange, elusive world of the invisibly sick.

# 2 [4 November 2008]

Corinne Lewis

The triptych series Transmutations is the culmination of an enquiry into the complex subject of Man’s relationship with Nature. With the application of the symbolic use of the natural and the manmade, I examine the very fabric of photography itself.  

The camera, the manmade element, uses nature (light) to reflect and freeze a moment. Water, one essential element of life is frozen to produce icy landscapes demonstrating a constructed echo of the cameras intention. The feathers, again symbolic of the natural, spark notions of flight, nature’s complexity and power, of Greek mythology (Icarus) and wonderment. The magic of the natural and the manmade collide and provide us with a moment of reflection into the world of technology and Natural History. 

The Greek linguistic origins of the word Photography also provide the perfect platform to examine the marriage between the manmade and the natural, therefore signifying the integral role of text within my creative practice. The continuing battle and dependence between Man and Nature is ever present, with technology at the forefront providing solutions and destruction in equal measure.  

            “A compound of two Greek components – phos (light) and graphie (writing, drawing and delineation) – photography is significant on a number of levels. As a word, it posits a paradoxical coalition of “light” (sun, God, nature) and “writing” (history, humankind, culture), an impossible binary opposition “fixed” in uneasy conjunction only by the artifice of language.” 

Burning with Desire, Geoffrey Batchen

# 3 [5 November 2008]

Iain Harker

Iain Harker’s series ‘The Food Front’ present a fully-formed fictional domestic landscape, set in an imagined future. His photographs are constructed scenarios, and collectively they recall the science-fiction narratives of cinema and novels, in part. He gives shape to a post-apocalyptic scenario, where the causes of the changes to the means of production are unclear. What is wholly clear, however, is that in this fantastic world, whilst industry seems to continue, agriculture has been decimated. In the photographer’s words, “I have created a world where the everyday man is forced to look back at traditional cultivation techniques in order to evolve and apply them to an urban dystopia. Harker’s contribution to the iconography of future dystopias is, however, highly unusual. Unlike the high drama of recent cinematic productions like ‘28 Days Later’ or ‘Children of Men’, or the literary models provided by Philip K Dick or JG Ballard, there are no epic or heroic elements here; no cataclysmic events; no novel technologies. There is just the day-to-day prosaic business of ensuring one’s personal stock of food in adverse circumstances, using unexpected means. Harker’s situations record ordinary, domestic, situations in which the requirements of survival have caused strange additions to our present repertoire of domestic objects. As the photographer notes, “I want the viewer to think they’ve witnessed a secret event, or have just walked in on something they shouldn’t have.” The impression is of works which are one part tableux and one part ‘seen through a keyhole’, to use Edgar Degas’ words. They are both “heavily constructed” but “staged in a real environment” and “believable”, to use Harker’s. The tone, accordingly, is one where cheerful domestic ordinariness is scarcely interrupted by “sinister” and incongruous elements. This tone reflects the fact the images originated from Harker’s interest in both global food production and in the use of allotment spaces locally. His series links wider issues that affect us all, with speculation about how we would individually respond to a thoroughly plausible future crisis. 

# 4 [7 November 2008]

Toby Lloyd

Toby Lloyd works in the tradition of conceptual photography established in the late 1960s and early 1970s by such figures as Keith Arnatt and John Stezaker. Lloyd has remarked that Arnatt’s series of self-portraits, titled as the ‘Impossible Document’, have provided a particular inspiration. In this series, the earlier artist documented his performances of improbable, absurd or self-referential tasks recorded sequentially by the camera. Whilst drawing on Arnatt’s example, Lloyd’s work has its feet firmly in the twenty-first century. Lloyd has described his project as “an investigation of the self and my environment through a series of self-portraits… I am interested in how we negotiate the landscape of advertising and corporate branding.” The unstinting celebration of the self, through consumer activity, might certainly be said to be one difference between Arnatt’s generation and those after. One of Lloyd’s most recent works, ‘Narcissus’, bears this out. It documents what might be described as an image of extraordinary ordinariness: a screenshot of the Google homepage. There can be few people who have not seen this image. It is, truly, one of the few pictures which almost every adult and child can claim to be familiar with, and yet has almost no visual interest. Lloyd’s use of the page as a ‘found image’ is intentionally banal to the highest degree. The simplicity of the work belies the fact that it is a palimpsest, a way to open out onto wider social and psychological tendencies. Lloyd’s means of achieving this is through the addition to the page of his own name: minimal means with maximum meaning being his dictum. The work is a taut description of our collective love of new technologies, but it is at another level, an old-fashioned cautionary tale dressed in the newest of clothes. For those of a certain age, the work echoes the Victorian trope taught to children that if one gazes into a mirror long enough, one would see the devil reflected back. Here, in the virtual space, like in the Victorian looking glass, we not only see ourselves, but our deepest fears embodied, and encounter the relentless horrors that are our true selves.  

# 5 [10 November 2008]

Jennifer Kirk  

Jennifer Kirk's preoccupation is with the everyday artefacts that order and control our lives without us scarcely being aware of it. Her project is to picture the promise of technology, and to make plain how we are all reliant upon thousands of digital technologies whilst scarcely registering the fact, let alone being aware of how they function or are produced. As she remarks, "from the digital alarm clock we switch off first thing in the morning to the last kettle of water boiled at night, we are reliant on microchip technologies without having any understanding of how they are created or how they function." Despite their ubiquity in our houses and offices, Kirk's subject matter is rendered unfamiliar. That her images are akin to landscape photographs, and feel like places rather than objects, is of signal importance. Her use of long-exposure macro-photography illuminates the microscopic landscape of the printed circuit board and the LED. The super-saturated colours of Kirk's prints reflect their long exposures, where digital cameras have been overwhelmed by information on settings they were never designed for. The effect is to create coloured mandalas or haloes echoing her view that "technology has become the new religion" - a conceptual space in which we can invest our identities, and a kind of belief system in which our insensate faith is placed. Using macro-lens to alter our sense of scale fundamentally makes strange these miniaturised, machine-made spaces. Kirk pictures what she calls the "technology landscape" from "the inside", from within the computer, the clock, the kettle maybe - for we cannot tell - itself. We become like Gulliver, a Lilliputian figure confronted with towering gargantuan objects. This process forces us to look at each individual component, its texture, form and function, as well as place within the whole, rather than at an entire printed circuit board or LED as a finished, manufactured object. Like Gulliver, in Kirk's work, we find everything "alien or foreign" as she describes, even when we know things should seem familiar. As she also notes, she has not chosen to examine the more esoteric, or high-end artefacts of the technological landscape: quite the contrary. Her purpose, in photographing standard consumer items, is precisely to resignify the most "universally recognised symbol of microchip technology" - the printed circuit board. In doing this, she asks how technology provides symbolic functions in our culture, and what symbolic functions it has taken over from other areas of thought.

# 6 [12 November 2008]

Richard Glynn 

Richard Glynn presents two projects. The first is a study of one of the most intensively industrialised sectors of the economy, and one which every citizen is dependent upon, but which only roughly 3% of the UK workforce are employed in. The basis of modern agribusiness has been radically revised in the space of a generation, and over the same timeframe the number of consumers able to have any understanding of how their food has been produced has been similarly transformed. Yet alternative methods of production and distribution have been pioneered, and secured a small, but viable foothold in the marketplace. Glynn’s study alights upon a particular farm within the latter category. It is an organic dairy farm run upon humane principles. Unusually, the business controls the entire vertical chain of production and distribution, rather than being dictated to by supermarkets, and yet is owned and managed by a single entrepreneurial team. How, Glynn asks, to picture and symbolize a process, rather than the product, whose appears by definition is the same as those of competitors? How also to represent that this is an alternative model? One answer has been to document the entire process of production and distribution: the owner has his own bottling plant for milk and his own delivery system and sales service. In what might be described as the post-industrial model under scrutiny here, the principle might be empathy – for both the consumer and each animal involved in the production process. I use the word each as Glynn describes his studies of cows as “portraits”. Though each animal is tagged and numbered, each image captures their individual characteristics, in close-up focus, and is presented at a large scale to convey their dignity and grandeur. Rather than viewing animals as units of production alone, we are entranced by the lustrous textures of skin and fur, and of the sense of an individual consciousness. This model farm, Glynn proposes, is a microcosm of how we might yet be able to collectively function as a society: as with all steps towards the good life, it better enables us to see the difference between cost and value. 

The second project is in its infancy. The central tower of the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle was designed as a ballroom but never completed. Now it is being transformed into specialised storage and a library. How will the observed calm of these forgotten spaces change as they are returned to the bustle of a working museum? 
 
 
 

# 7 [13 November 2008]

Kim von Kothen  

Kim von Kothen’s self-reflexive practice is based upon observing, condensing and synthesising her impressions of her environment into poetic form. Her project “Conversations in between strangers” began by undertaking close observations of the conversational ‘dance’ between herself and various others, charting the dynamics of conservations, making notes on how each game of interaction ebbs and flows. Her work is, then, neither an extended self-portrait, nor strictly speaking a series of portraits of others, but a meditation upon a given situation and the factors which impinge upon it. Her images are not to be read as transparent pictorial windows, opening onto a third imaginary space which we can inhabit unproblematically. The works create their own poetic universe based upon, but distinct from the photographer’s own. This is a manner familiar from the working method of many novelists, and her oeuvre is to be viewed almost as a modernist work of art: as a constellation of artefacts whose justification is their own presence, not that of being subservient, second-hand representations of life outside the picture frame.Von Kothen describes her subjects as “passengers with their own autobiographic load, with their partly given, and partly self-constructed self-presentation”. Through her work, we are made aware of the artifice of self-presentation, and of the language of the photographic image. Indeed the project is, at root, a “narrative about photography” whose aims is to “further debate rather than to depict reality”. To achieve this, her triptychs for example encompass three distinct viewpoints upon a given individual. Firstly: a close-up portrait; second, a study of the room the photographer habitually encountered them in; third, a still-life, or detail of that room in tight focus. Encountering these, we are akin to detectives at a crime scene, piecing evidence together to create a narrative, rather than witnesses of an event. Equally, we achieve this by assessing the evidence of dwelling and analysing how individuals command space, rather than passively accepting a work as an objective description of an individual. We are forced to become aware of the artifice of presenting portraits as though they were transparent or naturalistic documents of others’ lives. Rather, Von Kothen’s project is to explore the fabric of a relationship, and to allow us to enter into the texture of that relationship, rather than to observe another individual as a static object or from a third-person perspective. 

# 8 [18 November 2008]

Claire Rousell

 "Give up belonging, that was the only way to free yourself" - Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit

Claire Rousell's work intertwines our collective histories and private memories. In creating images, she combines diverse sources, ranging from official documents such as maps to personal artefacts such as historical photographs from family albums, whilst linking them with hand-made objects which draw the two together. Rousell's work examines how identity and place are related; and how migration and travel between places contributes to our sense of belonging or lack of belonging. Her most recent work queries how we can imaginatively recreate or recapture the past, and our own pasts, through the use of images. Maps, of places in the UK and Rhodesia, provide the 'ground' against which black and white portraits act as the 'figure', to adapt terms from painting. The maps are of locations which the sitters knew: specifically as Rousell notes, "the women sit at the centre of the network of roads and train lines around the town they lived in". The women are carriers of historical narratives, and one map marks out a clear historical breach. It is from the late 1970s, just prior to the beginning of the new nation of Zimbabwe. The effect is encountering the works is akin to being immersed in one of JG Sebald's novels, in which the past is forever set at a distance but where the imperative to 'regain' it is never lost, and indeed is a fundamental part of our mental apparatus. Indeed Rousell's framework is best seen as novelistic: as encompassing diverse characters, settings, and potential narratives, interwoven across generations, the relationships between which are left for us to imaginatively piece together. Two further elements transform the images into three-dimensional objects. Artefacts, like needles, are embedded into the paper, marking out – conceivably - the labour of the figure represented. Moreover, each image is surrounded by embossed paper, which bears the imprint of decorative patterning. This patterning refers to the style in which South African domestic ceilings were once furnished, between the 1890s and 1920s. These patterns, intended to echo European plasterwork of the time and connote high status, were originally constructed from the local material of tin. They embody the idea that our identities are fundamentally relational, hybrid and multiple in nature.