ARTISTS TALKING

# 11 [10 November 2010]

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.

# 12 [28 November 2010]

"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.

# 13 [4 January 2011]

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.

# 14 [6 January 2011]

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'.

# 15 [19 January 2011]

' ... 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.

# 16 [31 January 2011]

GLIMPSES

STOP-START

BRIEFLY

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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'.

# 17 [3 February 2011]

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.

# 18 [18 February 2011]

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...

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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.

# 19 [27 February 2011]

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.

# 20 [5 April 2011]

Axel Antas: NEW TO NATURE at Rokeby Gallery, London.
Exploring relationships between landscape and technology, nature and artifice »

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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