Ottica TV is going to have a screening tomorrow night at The Better Bankside Centre, 18 Great Guildford Street (corner of Zoar Street behind Tate Modern), London, SE1. Ten minute movie shorts by a selection of international artists. From 6.00 – 9.00.
They are going to screen RQV2, the first video-walk I made at the camp.
Winter here has been particularly hard, cutting wood and frequently loading the fire has figured highly, but strangely for this time of year has been eclipsed by trips to Berlin and London for exhibitions and screenings and an exciting collaboration with a composer who lives up the road.
Blaise Merino, the composer, is the bassist for what could be described as a thrash-metal trio. He has locked himself away for the winter and focusing on his own work. I emailed a video to him before Christmas as we had previously talked of a collaboration – he finished the piece yesterday. I visited him, not too sure what to expect. There is definitely throbbing bass, but echoing the rhythm of my footsteps and syncopated juxtaposition of frames. Crackles and distortion give way to hypnotising waves of sound. It’s refreshing to work with someone in tune with what I’m doing and sympathetic to the visuals. I plan to upload it to my new website (www.jonathan-moss.com).
I’ve also found time to start a new series of paintings (sounds like a luxury bonus in the daily routine of things) – I’m basing the images on the wall textures of the huts. Weathered surfaces and drips revealing the passage of time are dominating the work. I intend to spend a day at the camp this week to draw and paint to feed into the process of making.
The wind is strong here at the moment. I’m not looking forward to sitting in a ruined hut waiting for it to crumble around me – they’ve stood for 70 years, but recently some of the rooves have been partially removed which could have weakened the remaining structure, so I’ll probably wait till the wind has died down.
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After a long wait I’ve received the large format negatives that Peter Watkins kindly took for me at the camp on a blustery night last month – we projected my videos stills on to the walls of the huts.
The photos of the projections on the exterior of the huts have a strange, eerie quality, projected light contrasts with natural disappearing light. It is as if the scene was a stage-set illuminated by stage lighting. I have yet to print the images, but have a few ideas how they can be presented.
The images which strike me most, though, are those of projections on the interior walls – decaying, peeling paint has been worn by 70 years of dripping water; vertical lines made by the rivulets dominate what seems at a glance to be a flat surface.
I am a painter-printmaker and video-artist focusing on the links between a micro and macro view of nature. The initial stage of my creative process is to make videos; my paintings and prints take inspiration from these videos – seemingly abstract, but with a basis in the 'seen' world. My goal is that my pieces transcend particular spaces and become places in which to lose oneself. I am particularly drawn to hidden histories. My current project explores my identity and neurodiversity using images of my own cells as a form of self portraiture. My love of pattern and repetition is a big part of who I am: chaos can be transformed into order - a way of structuring my own chaos.
I have a studio in North Yorkshire.
