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.
http://www.jonathan-moss.com/
Recently I’ve been working on the rushes I made at the sites of the camps – particularly Argeles.
Being totally absorbed by editing on the computer and the creative process seems so far removed from walking and recording at the sites and even more distanced from the events that occurred at these places – but that’s the nature of making art.
Viewing the videos frame by frame is very exciting as the random zooms of the vegetation, soil, sand, rocks etc grab my attention for the first time. At this stage I suppose I view the videos as a series of stills and I am constantly working out which stills would work independently to the videos, it is not until I work on the sound that I see these groups of stills as a coherent whole.
So, that’s the stage I’m at now – working on the sound, editing the actual noise I encountered whilst recording: my footsteps, the zip of the camera case jingling, breathing, birds singing, waves crashing . . . ; one particular sound I’m looking forward to playing with is that of a wire fence twanging (technical term) in the wind.
http://www.jonathan-moss.com/
I have been painting today. It’s funny that initially I attempted to recreate the images of my paintings in video and now I am basing my paintings on the stills of the videos. It is also strange how my videos are abstract but the stills themselves become more figurative – details emerge: grass, rocks, textures of dry earth…
My work has always been based on memories of walks in the landscape and I thought why can’t the walk itself could be the end result, recorded through video?
It is easy to be absorbed in the process of working with images in the studio, which is important, but I felt with this project that it is vital for me to be personally involved in the camp at Rivesaltes; I have requested to be a volunteer at the detention centre which holds refugees awaiting visas, situated on the edge of the camp where my videos are made.
http://www.jonathan-moss.com/
