Old Artwork – PART I

The other day I started to go through my old artwork and began to digitise some of it. This post is the first in a series of the results. I don’t really expect anyone else to find these posts quite as interesting as I do. One thing I’ve concluded about contemporary art, is rarely does anyone find any particular work as fascinating as the artist who actually produced it. Mine is probably no exception.

One of the more successful images utilising a prop, a woman's shoe, photographed on Hearsall Common, Coventry.

The work starts in 2000, about half way through my art foundation course. At this time I began to explore the basic idea of ‘you never really know what you see’. All sorts of things have hapened in all sorts of places. Indeed most of what has happened in a particular place (maybe even your own home), we are unaware of.

These ideas resulted in me spending quite a bit of time hanging around in city centres at odd times of the night, and letting myself into empty houses, taking photos of locations where significant events may or may not have taken place. I started off taking photos of props that I’d plant in locations. Things like an odd shoe or a broken pair of glasses. The kind of thing that you sometimes see, and which might make you stop for a second and think how it came to be there and what happened.

This idea reached it’s natural conclusion; if you show too many photos with props in then they begin to seem a little forced and obvious. So I began to focus on the locations themselves, and on other ways I could hint at what might have occurred.

These later images, without props, were shown projected onto a screen in a darkened room. While these images were changing on a slide carousel, I played sounds through speakers into the room. I haven’t managed to find the cassette on which I recorded these sounds, but it consisted of all sorts: Bird song, children playing, footsteps, banging doors, muffled shouting, distant sirens, undergrowth rustling, water trickling etc.

So these sounds appeared on a different rotation to the images. Each time you saw the work you would have a different experience. At the time I hoped viewers would see each of the images as potential stages, on which various past events had played out. With a slightly obvious focus on the seedy and criminal side of things.

Looking again at the slides I’d taken for this work made me realise quite how different they are from the digital images I take now: The interesting thing about slide film is that unlike a digital image (and even a photo print) it has a physical quality to it, an authenticity. That piece of film you’re staring at is the actual piece of film that was in the camera at the very instant the shutter was opened. It has a physical link to the light of the past, something that the pixels on a screen can never have.

At the time of taking these photos I was aware of their possible shortcomings, of not being able to directly transfer that feeling I got when I was taking them to viewer when they looked at them. I’ve often been disappointed with art and how that real life experiences are much more intense and moving than any art exhibition has ever been. Even relatively mundane things like the colour of the sky on a particular evening, or the look of traffic lights reflecting of a wet road. It was these feelings that I wanted to be able to recreate in the viewer, but the fact that you’re in a gallery somehow spoils it.

These were the last images I produced on my foundation course. Part II will continue as I started at university, including videos on buses, photos in subways and plastic people…

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1. James Dick » Old Artwork – PART II — July 8, 2010 @ 22:56

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