Last night I returned to my studio to work with film. It was an intense evening of experimenting and playing, finding new ways to combine drawing with film.

What helped me get there was looking at some of my old work and seeing the connections between the moving image and the drawing. Alongside reading about Helen Chadwick, an artist I am greatly inspired by. Her photography,  the photocopy pieces that she did on the floor, and images made with liquid light photo emulsion on objects – they all were layered and collaged. I’ve always been interested in projecting onto objects and forms, and explored using liquid light myself in the 90’s.  Tony Oursler projected moving images of faces onto solid forms also had a big influence on me too, when I was doing my MA.

I only recently realised that making  pictures doesn’t accommodate my love of film. If I want to go and see art that inspires me it will rarely be a framed picture on the wall, it’s more likely to be an installation in response to place, involving video, sound,  objects – that’s where my heart lies. Experiential. 

When I saw Emily Joy last week and we talked about the experimentation she was going through with Colin Higginson, I felt  excited and intrigued, I thought yes, this is how I need to be working. Exploring, testing, responding.

There is a dilemma here, of course, because I don’t have any product to sell from those situations, but that can be ignored for now. I have to really embed myself in this coming together of different mediums, like I did with the Melt and Flow drawing and  the QR code. I’d like to return to the Fishtank. I will see if I can make some films that capture what I want – the juxtapositioning of real, drawn and digital. 

One of the best films I did last night used a film of the Fishtank superimposed over a landscape drawing. The drawing is very simple, it’s literally just the horizon and the islands, so adding footage onto the surface worked well.  

Another work, using the film of the deluge, the flooding that I did when I hosed everything down and distorted the landscape is not unlike the viral landscapes that Helen Chadwick did, but I’m using moving imagery.

I have recently been scanning things – objects-  stones – flowers – maybe they need to come in too? Something about that relationship between the plants, soil, rocks and the materiality of the landscape in relation to how it looks.

I feel like I’ve turned a corner. I quite like the fact that I don’t know what is just around the next corner and have new directions to move in.

Turning corners is a really interesting thing to say in terms of seeing things.  It may be a place that’s familiar, but when you turn a corner and everything changes it is hard to orientate yourself. Like turning off a busy street like 5th Avenue in NY and finding yourself in a somewhat dodgy, quiet street, or an alley that feels edgy and smells of piss. 

Maybe that’s where we are now with climate change. We’re on the cusp of turning a corner, we don’t know what we’re going to see. We may think we know, but the truth is we won’t really know until we go around that corner.

We are at the crossroads with climate change. We can go in any direction, but none of them are particularly good.  We are somewhat lost.

Untethered.

Entering unmapped terrains.