ARTISTS TALKING

# 41 [20 June 2010]

(Cont.)

So the pieces I'm working on:

Carpet - might be on a wall, might not be, might have something done to it - possibly a projection of a shadow from where the bay window would have been. It would be a shadow from somewhere else, not related to the carpet itself, or where it's from - basically a recording of another trace, layered on top of this one, so two different documents are intermingling, but as a viewer you're not sure about the relationship between them.

Video - hour long recording on the light from a window moving over the floor. A sound track from the same space is recorded from at a different time, so as you watch the visuals, you're aware of something else happening which you can't see, but is taking place in the same room.

Photographs - very excited about my new medium format camera. It's about 40yrs old, is solid as a brick, has interchangeable lenses and bellow. Yes. Bellows. I've been playing around with bulb exposures and slide film, photographing small details of domestic spaces, traces of light on walls, through curtains... If I can get hold of a 6x6 projector, then perhaps I just project one image. Or maybe just one print. I know that I don't want any framed prints, as then it's about an image, where as I would prefer to see any printed photographs as objects. So paper and printing processes need to be carefully considered here. I was thinking at one point, of having these as a looped DVD, where one still image melts into another, into another... but I think now this is going to be a proposal for something else.

Fireplace - I've got the plaster fire surround from our house, and the idea is to turn it the wrong way round so you can see the interior of it, then put it in a fake wall. So when you look at it, there's this feeling of perhaps being in the wall.

Overall sound piece - I've been recording ambient sounds from the house, with the idea of making a soundscape which subtly suggests the domestic space within the gallery location. Again, time issues here.

So there we are. Also, just posted a review of the National Glass Centre's current exhibition The Glass Delusion up on Interface. I've haven't written many reviews before, despite having opinions about just about everything, so thought I should rectify this. Here's the link: http://bit.ly/dkK7kK

# 42 [20 June 2010]

Yeah. So editing, right? It's gotten to the stage that this is an increasing priority. After deliberately trying to stay open-ended about processes and ideas, my MA exhibition opens in just over two months and there is a limit to how many pieces will work together in the space I've got, and how many I can realistically make.

I'm showing in the Hatton Gallery, which as far as exposure is concerned is a bonus, as this tends to get the most foot-fall. However, the distinct drawback is having five days to install, and only 9-5 at that. Now bearing in mind it took over a month to install my interim show, and that was generally working 9-10 most days, you can see why that might be causing me a few anxieties. And that's not to mention Schwitters. The Hatton Gallery has a permanent installation of Schwitter's Merzbarn, which adjoins the space I'll be using. This causes difficulties whatever exhibition is installed in this space, as Tyne and Wear Museums dictate that it cannot be covered in anyway, and that the large green information panels remain in place. So you've got the choice of ignoring it (pretty difficult) acknowledging it, or in my case, using it as an instrumental part of the installation I'll be making.

The reason I'm going down this route is for several reasons - as a use of the space it suits the way I like to work, but more importantly, there are echoes of the Merz in work I'm making. I've taken a carpet from one environment (in this case a domestic one - the first Merz was created in a domestic space), and am re-locating it to another. Schwitters also made incorporated lots of pre-existing objects into his work, again, similarities here.

Continues...

# 43 [19 July 2010]

Decision time. And mass editing time. Despite having about 80gb worth of video footage, I'll not being showing any of it (add harsh editing decisions to that). Carpet is staying but is having nothing done to it, no projections, nada. It works very nicely as it is thank you very much - see images attached to this post.

Managed to locate a medium format projector (and a rather fancy one at that) so I'll be showing one of my photographs as a projection and another as a c-type print on aluminium.

And finally, there'll be an as-yet-to-be-made sound piece. I'll be setting up 4 mics in the house - one in the bedroom, one on the landing, one in the hall, and finally one between the back room and the kitchen. I'll then recording me and Andy moving about, possibly getting ready to go out - as we move about the house, the sounds will be picked up by the different mics, the idea being that when it's played back via four speakers in the gallery, you'll get the sense of us moving about the space.

Not sure about the fire surround as yet - it seems to be becoming something else, something more sculptural and less about documentation. I've finished Stage 1 - making boxes to hold the separate sections in the right place, and which also enables the piece to be broken down into sections for storage and transportation - this thing is bloody heavy. Stage 2 will involve filling said boxes with expanding foam with plasterboard on top, and finally Stage 3 will involve a plaster render. Not sure if it's going to be going into a fake wall anymore, or whether it would be more interesting seeing the packing crates. Hmmmmm.

One of the later video ideas I had involved using various different photographs, and plans of the house and making a piece in which these different sources seemed to melt into each other. This was an earlier edited plan, but I've put version of this forward to the lovely folks at Rednile (www.rednile.org) as a proposal for one of their Factory Night commissions at the Oceana in Wallsend (where coincidently, the work I made as part of the Wildworks project I was involved in last year was shown). Will know the outcome of that in a few weeks time (fingers crossed).

My night time reading consists of a couple of music tech text books (Spatial Audio and Shaping Sound), I'm catching up with some reading about cultural concepts of documents and documentation and I'm on the hunt for writing about how the Victorian's believed recorded sound to be akin to cheating death. Relevant? I think so.

# 44 [20 August 2010]

So, this time next week I think it's pretty safe to say, I will be feeling more than a little worse for wear following copious amounts of wine at the preview for my MFA grad show. This delightful thought (and having a couple of days off afterwards) is keeping me going as we enter The Final Week.

I've (hopefully) finished the audio work and laid my hands on some fancy speakers for the show. I say hopefully, as unfortunately I couldn't hear a massive amount of it when I was adding an additional recording to it this morning, due to the pneumatic drill be used outside the edit suite. Will have another listen tomorrow (fingers crossed) after I've finished making the panels to construct a dividing wall in the gallery.

After a couple of conversations, I realised I was being a bit slow with my idea for the audio work - instead of recording movement, it made much more sense to record the sounds of an empty house. The work is therefore very subtle - there are sounds of passing traffic on the street outside, the sound of the refrigerator and a toilet dripping. All very slight. I don't want it to feel like there's a lot of sound going on, just small moments that give the feeling of domestic indoors-ness, transplanted into this gallery location. Originally I was going to put the speakers up on the mezzanine floor around my exhibition space, but decided against this for three reasons: firstly, as the piece is so quiet, there should be an indicator for the audience that there is an audio piece there; secondly, as I'm being so blatant with the carpet, it seemed kind of daft to then disguise the speakers; and thirdly, surprisingly enough, speakers work best at ear level. It was recommended that I read David Toop's Haunted Weather - a really interesting book about sound, space and memory. I love it when you read stuff with litters the text with references you've already come across, or ideas that you've been thinking around, perhaps in different contexts - Austerlitz is mentioned a few times, and he also describes how "sounds are woven with memory". Lovely stuff.

On a different, but irritatingly hilarious note, I managed to completely trash the transparency I was going to project, and have been spending the last week hoping that we'll get some sunshine at around 10am so that I can re-take the photograph. I've had a wee bit of success, but the camera is still set up as in theory there should still be enough time to get another film developed if necessary.

I'm not quite panicing yet.

# 45 [7 October 2010]

The post-MA world is a bit of a weird one. You always know after working so stupidly hard on a project, that there’s this odd flatness when it’s finished. Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite pleased to be done – but having spending all week working in front of a computer at home so far is a wee bit of a change to being pleased to leave uni by 9pm at night.

So, the exhibition. I showed 3 pieces – the carpet piece, now entitled ‘Document’, and sound work ‘Empty House’. These were shown together in the Hatton Gallery, whilst my medium format projection ‘Untitled (Projection)’ was shown in a separately, in a space just outside the Hatton. Various reasons for this - although I wanted to have this build up documents in one space, visually it wasn’t working in the slightest. The projector would have ended up bang-slap in the middle of the gallery, disrupting the view of the carpet. I tried putting it next to the Mertzbarn, (which I’d built a wall in front of to give the carpet some space) but again, there was a massive over-crowding problem. In one of those lovely accidental things that actually work quite well, the light from the projector ended up really lighting up the space – as the transparency was an overexposed shot of light coming through a window, this seemed to work pretty nicely. Images attached to this post show ‘Document’ and ‘Untitled’, follow this link for ‘Empty House”: http://soundcloud.com/lauren-healey/empty-house

As a result of the MFA, I was awarded the Hole Editions Publishing Award (http://www.holeeditions.co.uk). I’ll be working with Lee Turner to produce a litho edition, which I’m really excited about. Instead of working directly from some of my photographs, our first idea is to see how litho plates work in a pin hole camera, the idea being that there’ll be a directness about the images being made. Neither of us have any idea how this will work, but I really like the openness to experimentation.

I’ve also got a studio sorted at the fantastic New Bridge Project http://thenewbridgeproject.blogspot.com , so will be able to get on with continuing the fire surround piece. I wasn’t convinced about using this for the exhibition, but after loosing a week due to some insane skin outbreak all over my face at the beginning of August, there was pretty much no choice but to put it on hold. Other pieces / ideas I’ll be working on in the coming months include: combining new recordings with found and archive sound, to create a situation where a linear understanding of time is disputed by over-layering recordings from different periods; and making a text piece which discusses the limitations of the document, whilst being written in such a way as to embody these limitations through the use of language, description and presentation. (And yes, I did pull those descriptions directly from an application I’ve just done). And if the funding comes though, I’ll be doing some writing for an exhibition catalogue for a gallery showing at the London Art Fair too.

Which is all good, ‘cos I really don’t know what to do if I’ve got 5 minutes space.

# 46 [30 November 2010]

Let's face it - writing proposals and applications isn't interesting. And neither is writing about writing proposals and applications. And seeing as that's primarily what I've been doing pretty much non-stop for the last months, you'll be understanding the reasons for lack of blog updates.

Despite feeling as if I'm forever in front of a computer, I have started work with Lee Turner at Hole Editions on the litho edition. The pin-hole idea didn't work at all - the plates are nowhere near as sensitive as photographic paper, and despite leaving a plate in a camera for a week in which there was plenty of bright sunshine, it seems that the sunlight has to fall directly onto the plate for it to affect the emulsion at all. So mark 2 involved taping a few plates up on the wall when there were lots of shadows being cast in the room and seeing what happened. I really wasn't expecting much with this, so we were both pleasantly surprised when we got some quite interesting results. (See the images top images accompanying this post). I quite like the simplicity of these - there's still a very much a Barthes-esq 'having been there-ness', along with a grainy feel to them - more photographic references perhaps.

The weather over the last few days has been accidently perfect, as I'd been waiting for it to snow. I was thinking of the snow in terms of erasure and absence, quite a weighty sadness to it. I went to a funeral at the end of last week - it snowed quite heavily on the journey to the crematorium behind the hearse, and with everyone dressed in black, the visuals felt quite Dickensian, appropriate for that type of occasion. The journey took us via the coast, but the sea wasn't visible because of a slight rise in the land. From my perspective the snow was positioned directly next to the flat grey sky. Both were empty and blank - quite incredible. I went back a couple of days later to photograph this, I should get the transparencies back tomorrow.

I also realised that I'm being very precious about these photographs I've been taking, perhaps a bit too pristine. So I've been experimenting with my pinhole camera (a large biscuit tin + black spray paint, hurrah!), as the long exposures give a sort of echoey quality to the images. I've got a lot of transparencies from over the summer, which for one reason or other weren't right for photographs or projections. I've put these on the floor back where the exposures were taken from, so that they get scuffed and scratched - physical marks from that space. A couple of images after a few days of this are attached to this post.

# 47 [6 February 2011]

I’ve been finding writing this blog a struggle of late. It’s quite difficult to write about work in a chatty, conversational way, when it’s been a bit of a low patch, work-wise. However, I generally feel better if I’m active and doing something, so as far as this blog is concerned, I’m going to try something new. Namely, I’m going to try an experiment in writing little and often, pushing through the down times, rather than writing long essays when I’m on the upwards run of the rollercoaster. Starting now.

So, attached to this post are a couple images from a sunny day last week. (Yes, there was one. Promise). Lee’s given me some larger litho plates which I was therefore able to expose. I got a bit excited about these – the sun was bright, that when it reflected off a tin and a CD case, it seemed to make a sort of 3D impression on the wall. I’ve no idea how this will work on the plate, but that’s kind of what I like about this work – neither of us know how it’ll work out, and it’s all a bit of guess work. I want to work with some colour when it comes to making the actual prints, rather than keeping them monotone (as the tester prints from my previous post are) When the sun shines through the curtains in our bedroom, they glow this sort of Technicolor yellow, like the kind of saturated richness associated with early colour film. I want to get some of this richness and depth into these prints, continuing the filmic, camera references.

# 48 [8 February 2011]

Second site visit to the Oceana today. This is one of the locations that Rednile had a Factory Night event a while back, and I put in a proposal for a project to take place there as a result of that. It’s essentially a business park on a site which was previously a marine research facility from around 1945 – 1985. There’s a mixture of buildings, some renovated and let as offices, others which still have wallpaper from the 80s covering up some rather beautiful 50s architecture. All this is intertwined with the rise and decline of shipbuilding in the UK and the North East, which has some pertinence given the current economic situation.

My original proposal involved making a video from archival visual documentation of the site, and interweaving this with contemporary images of the site. I was also being rather hopeful in that somewhere there’d be some old audio footage which I could intersperse with new recordings. It was therefore very useful to go back again, not least because as a result I’ve got a much clearer idea of what archival material – or indeed lack of it – is available to use. At first I was thinking this might be a real problem, but it could actually be quite interesting – our understanding of the past is informed by what documentation we have access to, so by there being a considerable gap, the whole subjectivity of what’s left is brought into question.

This is one of about three projects that are in this slight limbo stage – preliminary research and fundraising before anything concrete can be said to be happening. The other thing that all these projects-in-limbo currently have is my desire to collaborate with other people on them. Again, this wasn’t in the original proposal, but certainly looking around the site today, there’s so much to use, so many possibilities, that I think working with another artist, discussing ideas and approaches to create a work would be a really exciting way of tackling it.

# 49 [13 February 2011]

Feeling a bit pleased - just found out that I've gotten one of PVA Media Lab's SALT residencies, running from the end of Feb - begining of March. I'm a bit chuffed about this, as it'll mean making an audio work that I've been mulling around in my head for a bit, but with the distinct added advantage of technical support to help me realise it. This is an extract from the proposal I submitted:

"For this residency, I want to treat recorded audio as if it were a collage or palimpsest. What I like about these formats, is that although the top layer of paper or writing covers up what's below, you're always aware that there is something below, even though it may not be entirely clear what that something is. In terms of the document, Norman M Klein describes this quite nicely - he states that "the historian's writing should include an open-ended diagram of what information cannot be found: the document that was tossed away; the cracks in the sidewalk where the roots of trees, now gone, lifted the street". In relation to my practice, I'm interesting leaving a visual or audible reference of this residue, something that indicates that what's on the surface, isn't all that's there.

I'm intending to make a number of recordings at different times of day and night from an exterior location in Bridport (a location chosen at the beginning of the residency). The kind of location I'll be looking for will be quite noisy at times, and quiet at others, perhaps a side street in the town. I'll then use the studio time to construct these recordings into a soundscape in which some sounds are clear and up-close, whereas others have a feeling of audio remnants, form further away. I want the work to feel a bit rough, a bit raw and home-made, so with the help of PVA I want to play with different recording devices, and ways of manipulating the recordings in post-productions to achieve this". 

Actually, in terms of writing, this was a bit of a departure for me - normally proposals I submitt are really formal, but recently I was wondering if that was part of the problem, they've just been a bit dry. So I made a concerted effort to keep it lighter and chattier, to make it more how I would describe the idea if it were a conversation. Or like in this blog, thinking about it.

The image I've attached to this post is one of the latest test prints I've done with Lee. I've got one more plate to use, which I'm going to try attaching directly to the curtains on a really bright sunny morning, and see what happens.

# 50 [14 February 2011]

Image just in from Lee - all the plates he's done so far. I like the one on the far right particularly. (I'm also like this plan of me giving him an exposure, and then him does the rest. Could definately get used to this).