Amidst the infinite sorting out of life, work, post-MA follow ups, and everything else, suddenly the moment came to start a new piece of work. When I do that, I always get the feeling that I have already been thinking about it and planning it for some time, and this time, definitely so – I’ve been collecting material.
The way I work – with a new piece of work, it’s as if I can feel it beckoning, I can almost see it and feel it, but it is as yet beyond some turn or horizon. All my tensions and my scattered tasks fall into place with the purpose and focus of reaching that work. In recent years I want a long journey, no quick fixes, no quick works. I want to explore and weave together all those strands that are beginning to formulate now. A year, perhaps, several months – it’s like the equivalent of a novel. for myself it will be complicated, but at the end will be something straightforward for the viewer to behold, resolved, distilled.
I have ideas and plans crowding in, so many works to make, idea paths to follow. Sometimes you just find yourself playing around with something, getting involved, and soon consumed by it. Currently I have completely blank canvas for working on, a completely agenda free practice. I could write a novel, change career, make completely different art, anything, and all that freedom has led me to noticing a collection of images I took about two years ago over several months, but didn’t have the time to go that way then.
I usually stay away from using vintage material or any images taken by others, but this is the second recent work I am using appropriated material, yet in quite an oblique way – I took hundreds of photographs of old movies while they were playing on television – only certain types of movie, and playing live, so I watch them through a camera and take the photograph, rather than halting a video to take the still. Out of all the images, only some work and have captured what I am looking for – an abstracted image, like a suggestion or archetype, which is unrecognisable and unplaceable in a particular film, and yet sums up the situation so that the rest of the film is inferred. There is a lot of material to work with, and I see this building in a new way for me – to piece together an implied narrative.
I have also been thinking about the pace and rhythm of my work and plan to base that upon a more complex piece of work – like a collaged symphonic movie score. Crucially, I plan to alter the patterns I tend to have in work – instead of a minimalist musical pace, repeating with slight alterations, mirrored by the blending pace of the visual imagery, I will vary the pace with the music. This is quite a different way of working for me, but I need a reason for pace. I don’t like flashing and irregular imagery for no reason other than effect. the more I work the more I realise how akin to music and musical forms the underlying structure of my thinking is in moving image.
