In 2016, in his speech before meeting the Queen to relinquish political office, David Cameron thanked his wife Samantha for keeping him vaguely sane.
As a group of young artists working together in the two-year period following this event, we find ourselves in a state of flux, living, reacting and adjusting within this aftermath. Responding to this Brexit limbo and the ever-moving political landscape, the thing that has kept us all vaguely sane is the sanctuary of our creativity.
As a group of young artists working together in the two-year period following this event, we find ourselves in a state of flux, living, reacting and adjusting within this aftermath. Responding to this Brexit limbo and the ever-moving political landscape, the thing that has kept us all vaguely sane is the sanctuary of our creativity.
‘If one condition of photography is to capture the world – its ‘lights, shadows and particles’ – then its logic is to double or repeat that world through separation. Photography carves off a piece of the world and splits it from itself.’ - Jonathan T.D Neil on Rauschenberg Factum I Factum II.
The central impetus in my practice is to capture images from environments that are overlooked, the non-places that are bypassed and ignored. I document these spaces and disseminate these images through my @nocturnal_walk Instagram account. These moments are for me indicative of how our lives are intersected at indeterminate times of daily social media interventions.
Part of what I am questioning is how these images respond when they are removed from the digital ether, and printed as physical photographic forms. It is here where the fragility of their object nature becomes apparent. I see this as a language that does not then transcend back into the digital platform, but gains a sculptural presence that is captured and carved out of a relationship with reality.
Returning back to the nocturnal locations I have extracted increasingly abstracted forms, which further split the sense of reality from the original capture, using the key indexes of the photographic medium; time, place, light & shadow to align these objects, while also stretching the scale, installation & surface to the optimum tension. Therefore, the objects are brought to exist in an equilibrium between photographic and sculptural languages.
My process involves mobilising the photograph from its fixed loci for the production of light, sound & video installations. The photographic prints fix a moment in time, the aspect of time is explored differently in the video work, where it becomes a fluid captured event, repeatedly looping back on itself. An Anomalous Experience, 2018 aims to capture the experiential phenomena of rain. There is no name for that moment you feel the rain hit your skin, the sensation before your brain registers that it is raining. The parabolic speaker overhead recreates the experiential encounter with rain, the gravity of sound reproduces the reality of the original capture, cumulating in an encounter with an anomalous experience.
