About
I have been involved in a wide variety of educational projects and I am committed to socially engaged practice seeking to give communities a voice. I enjoy the challenge of engaging with the public and I have a wide range of practical experience of working with
- local authorities,
- charities,
- social enterprises,
- voluntary organisations
- communities groups.
In 2006 I joined forces with three other people to form a charity – digital:works – to further develop this type of work.
I am an artist who works in a range of digital mediums, including photography, video, animation, sound, print and the web. I enjoy a mix of working collectively to collaborate on artworks – to working on my own in isolation.
My initial art form I worked with was photography and this still remains my main love. My motivation for working with photography is to make sense of the things around me and to help serve as my visual memory. Whether it is looking at my family or looking at how we relate to our surroundings or simply looking more closely at the objects and spaces around us.
Since moving to Weymouth I have developed a keen interest in the traces we leave behind, in how our environment comes into existence and the marks we leave behind.
New Topography
Recording the landscape was something I have always been interested in through my early engagement of the “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape”. This was the title of an exhibition that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography in 1975. My photographic portfolio for getting into university was made up of this style of depicting urban or suburban realities in an attempted detached approach.
But on moving to the South West and being confronted with the Ridgeway and the Jurassic coast, this fascination with how landscapes evolve again started to preoccupy me.
I feel that we create the world around us and that we are, in turn, created by the world around us. In other words, the human condition is characterised by a feedback loop between human activity and our material surroundings. In this view, space is not a container for human activities to take place within, but is actively “produced” through human activity. The spaces we produce, in turn, set powerful constraints upon subsequent activity.
Public space
I’ve long been interested in public space; in the public/private spaces we inhabit, how we use and claim ‘ownership’ over these places. We often freely move from public to private spaces without being aware of crossing a boundary. I find it very interesting to observe where we gather and how we relate to one another (people watching is a very common pleasurable experience), seeing peoples movements as an unconscious choreography.
I get a lot of my inspiration from working in the public realm and interacting with people. I also get inspiration from the public space. This is interesting to me because it’s the space we move in. I’m interested in how people relate to each other. The public space is also a picture of how society changes.
As David Harvey has said in ‘Spaces of Capital’, “To locate ‘control’ it is necessary to peer beyond the glass and concrete facades of the modern city and look to the configurations that arise in the swirling mist of a forgotten and often distorted history. Not only do we transform ourselves through the forging of our environment but we can be forged through the transformation of that environment. Although this is clear, the role ideology (overt and implicit) plays in this process is not.”
For me there is an interest in revealing what is there through some system of digging, scraping away, a personalized form of archaeology, if that isn’t sounding to self-serious.
The Way I Work
In thinking about the way that I work I have begun to see, what I think, is a good pattern. I spend time in the studio thinking and developing projects, not so much making them, but planning them out. I like to get three or four on the drawing board, so I can bounce between them, but also so if one does not work out, I have other things to do. I’ve always a pile of projects planed out; like a roadmap, it lets me know that I always have things to do. I can’t just go into the studio and stare at the wall, I have work to do.
After getting a plan, I then go into production. Of course during this period much of the project is fleshed out and developed, but the foundation is there. It is exciting, but difficult. I enjoy the freedom of thinking about stuff, but when you actually have to start doing it, spending the money, making the work, engaging with people, it can get a bit daunting.
Sherborne House
Last summer I was the lead artist on a Cultural Olympiad project working with disadvantaged young people. Maps were compared to contemporary artists interpretation of the landscape. We worked cooperatively, sharing experience, while investigating paths around town, recording our experiences using drawing, photography, sound recording, writing and GPS (Global Positioning System). This led to an exhibition at Sherborne House, along with work being posted to Google Earth.
This was a pilot project for a larger one that will broaden out in following years to investigate footpaths through Dorset’s world famous countryside from Sherborne to Portland over a three-year period, working with different communities along the way.
This project will move between a variety of discourses including those of the art world, history, technology and geography. The aim is to produce a culturally inspired work that deals with human interaction with the landscape. SHA are confident of securing funding for this from the Art Council.
digital:works
With digital:works we aim to use the arts as an exciting way for people of all ages and backgrounds to engage with and learn more about others from their local community. Our principal aim is to give people a voice using a range of creative mediums.
Our first digital:works initiated project is ‘Our Working Lives’. This project came about through my negotiating with a local group of volunteers, Poole museum, along with my interests of documenting everyday history with local archives and new work. We are investigating the working environment and recording peoples memories of employment. These will lead onto an exhibition at Poole museum in 2010.
Initially I had envisaged that the project would mix the now with the historical information. And we would photograph the work place, along with the working structures around us (i.e. inside buildings – desks, computers, machines – and the actual buildings themselves in the landscape). This is an aspect I have not yet had the chance to secure funding for, but I’m still looking.
One part of the project they did fund is that we will be doing a coach tour of the industrial estates. Along with the tour there will be a commentary that will mix bits of the oral histories with contemporary sounds and live observations from one of the volunteers (who used to do coach tours of Bath).
abstract animations
These animations have been widely seen since they won at Sherborne House Open in 2006. Last year I took them with me to be shown on two big 25msq screens at Glastonbury. This was an arts council collaboration with the BBC and I was lucky to be selected with five other artists from around the UK to show work. These animations are now being shown periodically on Big Screens across the UK.
One of these pieces – sea – will now be shown at the UK Public Heath conference at Bournemouth International Conference next month – being projected in the large foyer space.
I have also been commissioned to develop a live interactive map of the conference. This will be a map that I will update during the conference; I will be interviewing people about their projects, uploading these sound files to the web and using google maps mapping them to where they happened around the country.
This work grew out of my playing in the computer program Flash. I really got into animating using ActionScript, enjoying the control it gave me in moving objects around the screen. This body of work came about by making controlled experiments.
This body of work involved me coding, which randomly places a preconceived set of images into the picture frame, depending on a set of rules. This then creates experimental abstractions that fuse technology with the visual arts.
Aesthetically I was heavily inspired by pop art, along with some ‘St Ives’ painters from the 60s and 70s. I wanted to work with flat colour and keep everything 2-dimensional.
Visually I was also influenced by where I live on the south coast of the UK. Living very near the sea, the light is always changing. What with this and the expansive views you get looking out to sea. In this work I wanted to reflect this experience using the power of abstract shape to create computer animation into a contemporary visual form.
Sound work
I started making my own sound works coming up for three years now. It was my animations I created that I needed some sounds for. Though they were made as moving paintings, I found that if I added sounds they were not better so much, just different and I found that once I had added these soundtracks (other peoples music) I ‘saw’ them in a different light and I preferred them with the extra soundtracks. I decided then and there to sit down and do my own music.
As a sound artist my interest is in field recordings, which is recording the sounds I find in the world, instead of recording musicians or other arranged sounds in a studio. The sounds that I like are accidents, which are not made specifically to be recorded.
I think a lot of sounds you hear in the world are very beautiful or at least very interesting; but we usually don’t notice them because we are too busy doing things.
For me soundscape compositions and sound installations.
- Making field recordings presupposes that you take your time to stay in one place longer than you would have first found necessary.
- Listening to field recordings means to trace a place and a time to discover something that sometimes originates in your own imagination.
- Field recordings unfold the beauty of what appears to be something commonplace.
- Field recordings induce you to reflect on the world and question its state.
- There are no limitations to field recordings. The selection of recorded objects describes a process of art.
- Field recordings recollect and reflect memories of all that has been.
- Field recordings capture the world: Environment (different sound occurrences from spatial distance) and inner world (animals, human beings, machines at close range).
I have added field recordings into my repertoire of community engaged work I undertake. As these types of recordings can be made with relatively cheap equipment. And the places, where noises are recorded, are not excluding socially disadvantaged groups. Far from it: Any worker, anybody on a bus or walking down the street can document noises in a much better way than managers, who lead a life in between the office and the company car.
Not only the conditions of making field recordings but also their content make way for a larger political equality than music and language. After all, noises are often recorded at public places. They therefore have a political dimension and are part of the public space. Yet they are also closely linked to the public, when the recorded events are private.
I call this the democratic quality of field recordings. It is enhanced by the fact that, through field recordings, the listeners can experience the sound of places that they might never be able to visit. That is not only a quality of a field recording but also of photography – both record media can easily complement one another. Their authenticity is not as important as their prospect of recording moments, atmospheres, noises and images and making them accessible, so that people can visualise a place they did not know. The new experiences and discoveries inspire people and make them “see” their world in a different way.
A field recording brings down social and cultural differences and inequalities, which characterise the structures of music and language.
Video
My latest body of video work is halfway between photography and painting. There is a lot more possibilities yet for me to discover here and I am currently composing the soundtracks to two new video pieces I have completed. With my animations I was always wanted to show the work on digital picture frames, but these never supported the flash file format, so with these works I have moved back to making videos and see them as moving pictures.
In my videos I don’t edit the material for example, they work as perfomative video, as I’ve said before, and I see public space as an unconscious choreography, where the camera becomes like a filter of reality. Though it’s always important for me that it works visually.
