Stating/Showing

Out (mirror image) and (painting as prop) with (house plant)

“I ended up having a late lunch with Geoff in his office, smelly cheese and crackers handed to me one by one. I said to him, it is foremost about documentation – I am not a film maker, I am a someone who messes with props and builds installations. Therefore I am not making a film directly, instead I am investigating the concept of a film by building frames one by one, by way of stop frame animation.”

Day out with out with simulacra is a film project using ornaments of everyday and objects of a gallery context to explore the cross-division of front room play and exhibition performance and display.

I have been using ‘out with’ a lot in my writing recently, it means something different to outside of, it also conjures a play on words that is, if anything, satisfying: “A day out with simulacra”, could mean a day out on the beach say with mirrors and plants and friends and your camera, or it could mean a day without simulacra, thereby being a day without any representative image of anything else: a day that is outside of normative exploration.

The ‘act’ then, in the end, was immersive and experimental – a whole day was spent (with dried fruit and ginger beer for sustenance) making imagery with the objects I brought with me and in the end making movement image. These films were then built on and finally rendered in to twenty different versions: each version untitled was then posted to a different audience member who consents, if they will, to take the DVD with the film on it home with them.

Thus the film never touches the gallery as an actual film, it exists erstwhile as another object hidden within the politics of space that is a gallery-cum-assembly or resource.

Images here are:
A ‘painting’ on the wall of a ‘gallery’
A day out on the beach in East Lothian
A film still, or photograph that in the end made the film, “Day out with simulacra”
A plastic plant found outside the gallery in the corridor

A Plan of just down the road from George Square (the leaf it tagged as me)

Mary Cooles’s perfection – alter-image – I entered in to her domain and the painting remained as my disguise.

“I am talking to you today about alter image.” This alternative image is changed during intervals in the installation process. You see before I made considerably large movements, God knows I had room for it then, now I make smaller perfections.

There is something about the house plants that litter my window seat in the living room. They have entered in to my drawing process as my drawings take place in that room, they have entered and are a part of – or perhaps already were a part of – my experience.

The other day, in envious delight, I visited the studios of two other artists who think a lot. In envious delight their studios exist on a mezzanine surrounding the gallery of the studio complex below. One of the artists has a cactus on his shelf, the other a picture of a cheese plant on her desk next to an open book or two. I now have a picture of another cheese plant’s leaf next to an empty espresso cup on my wall above my writing desk, tagged with bent over masking tape. In the picture, according to the photographer, the leaf is also tagged as me.

There must be a connection here. There are fucking house plants everywhere and this studio complex I entered in to uses house plants to make you feel at home, or to make the studio holders feel at home.

In this studio-cum-gallery in Glasgow, I will use a houseplant or two to make a projection in shadow on the wall, I will move one leaf one by one, tacked with masking tape to the floor.

Back to the window seat, where each pain, as you lie underneath the sill on the white sofa, frames another gull in the sky and another flag whistling in the wind: there on this sill I cannot sit, there are too many plants, and instead I place an oil painting on the window seat to dry in the sun. This painting is build on systematic geometry that is deliberately altered, a very conscious choice to go wrong. In the middle of this painting there is a whole, or a window, through which you can focus in again on the framed image: a gull seems closer for some reason, and the flags more resonant whipped in the sea air. I will bring this painting with me please and I will use this painting please as it is a painting and it belongs in a gallery not on a window sill.

Having moved

I thought it was time that I tackled the view from my flat. It adds layers to the city. The flat itself is on the top of a hill and the back faces southwest in to the hills. In the far distance there is a ski slope that is lit up at night. The weather of each day affects the view: some days (like today) you can see the hills as they dress the sky line and on others all that remains to be seen is the bare trees at the foot of the window across the garden. It is a different kind of view from that which I became used too. Glasgow offered the reflection of your flat within the windows of others. Leeds was much the same – quite on show that you were. This view reminds me of the hills of home, North East Derbyshire encroaching on the seven peaks of Sheffield and the Peak District itself. You could see the water tower next to my uncle’s house in Norton, south Sheffield from the landing window.

Perhaps this is it. Landmarks are a given in this place.

The other evening my friend needed the toilet so we entered in to the foyer of an arts centre around 6.30 pm for him to find suitable facilities. Before long we were asked by a young woman, who’s accent disguised her past, if we wanted a Peroni. We of course said yes and then three Peroni’s later we had learned she worked for a bank and was posted all over the UK to help promote one of its clients (you can guess which one). The promotion this times was in the guise of a photography exhibition, rare prints taken from Italian or Italian inspired films, in which Italian costume designers played a huge part. One particular print took my fancy. It depicted a 70s bar with one woman wearing a 70s style dress and three men with moustaches and matching suits. We decided to get to know the Peroni girl a little better – another bottle later we learned that she was from North East Derbyshire (Clown in Chesterfield to be exact), the town next to the one where I grew up. First off though she said she was from Sheffield too as I had said that is where I was from (well I was born there, in Jessops hospital, the hospital where my Grandmother on my father’s side had worked as a nurse). We were then a lot more exacting and confessed at having grown up just south of the Yorkshire border instead. I could see Sheffield and the water tower from my house on the hill though so I was sort of half lying.

She did not sound as though she was from just north of the midlands. And neither do I except when talking to Scottish people, as I want to accentuate my roots during my time living here. The landscape is the same but the accent is different I think.



To dally on the walkway and marry at the door

I seem to have acquired myself a mentor. A mentor that is impeccably fast at replying to emails – almost too fast, and definitely faster than I am at producing the work in the first place.

The mentor is currently working through this text for me. The text is then edited at a faster pace than it takes for the mentor to get back to me, this being a response to her well-practiced speed in reading, thinking, responding and making things constructive.

Keep writing (making) making writing she says.



“I would like to give you this but I would not recommend it

Today I changed someone’s gender. A male walked in to work through the glass doors. Using this pen, keeping a tally of the footfall we, I marked him down under ‘F’ instead of ‘M’. He is now a

Today someone recommended me a pen. It was the same pen they held in their hand – a pen which I assumed to be theirs. Later they took the pen and placed it in their coat pocket. Later still they left their coat over the edge of their chair and went to the bar. Whilst they were at the bar I stood up, reached for the coat, put it on and left. Later still I got home, took off the coat and hung it over the back of the door in the kitchen. I put my hand in the pocket and stole the pen too. These words are written with this pen. These words are a confirmation of this very theft. It is enough to write this story on this page rip the page from the note book and place it, folded, in to the coat pocket replacing the pen. I shall return the coat but not the pen and say thank you for the recommendation.

Female. This pen is transcendental of gender but only has affect as far as its ink can stretch, therefore upon back to the other side of the glass door his sex changed back again in time. Much like an upside down nature fountain (a waterfall) and an upside down modernist waterfall (a fountain) things change depending on how you name them. Things change depending on the name they are given.”

I came across this text whilst studying the catalogue for 2011’s Glasgow Film Festival. Someone had left the catalogue on the floor in the foyer of the Glasgow Film Theatre. I picked it up and out slipped a page with these very words on it. Here I have copied them word for word entirely but what I find strange is that this pen, whether it’s the same pen in each side of the story, happens to take on a certain character with a certain agenda. It has the ability to change things. Maybe at one point this was written with a pen in a hand, but now the text exists in print out with the raw element withheld in hand writing.

I’m not entirely sure what I think about it.