21 April 2009. An interview I did with Naomi Cass of the Centre for Contemporary Photography in their online magazine, Flash
29 March 2009. Statement to accompany Overhead Project (Galla Placidia) exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography.
In the series Overhead Project, I create illusory spaces. These works derive from the tradition of decorative ceilings that use perspectival techniques to achieve architectural effects. Entering those spaces, you are surrounded by the combined effects of the real architecture and its illusory embellishments.
The pattern of the perforations in the ceiling CCP suggest the starred vaults that are a common feature of early Christian chapels like the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. The labyrinth pattern used in is from the vaulting of this chapel. The pattern can be repeated infinitely; in theory the lines have no end. In this work, the pattern emerges for a short distance through the ceiling in CCP’s Gallery Four.
Previous works in this series have been figurative and expansive; Overhead Project (Galla Placidia) is more reserved and contemplative. With the dark space and the mirrored surfaces, the work is less like a grand chamber, more like a small camera.
30 April 2008. How to approach art history? My method is to address images with other images, to apply images anachronistically to each other. I am trying to come to a visual understanding of some of the meanings latent in the historical images that I copy, refer to and quote. For example, the Illuminated Books series superimposes portraits from historically diverse periods onto Roman portrait busts. The combined images investigate the traditions of representation, the meaning of likeness, and the standard of beauty. Similarly, the Scanner Camera images are suggestive of nineteenth century photography, but made using a scanner and a laptop. This application of a new technology to an old trope implies likenesses: glass plate; black hood; pictorialism, and highlights differences: pixelization; modern artefact; the end of the analogue.
24 May 2008. Statement to accompany Illuminated Books exhibition at McNamara Gallery. The Illuminated Books photographs are made using a book called Roman Portraits, published in London in 1940 by Allen & Unwin. The introductory essay, and the selection of images, is by Ludwig Goldscheider, author of the book Unknown Renaissance Portraits, which I used in my 2004 series of the same name.
The book contains fine black and white photographs of Roman portrait busts. Onto each portrait I have projected another portrait, selected from an anachronistic range of images. I photographed the portraits on slide film, choosing images from diverse periods from Coptic Egypt to contemporary photography, with a fair few things in between. I then projected the slides onto the Roman busts, overlaying one face with another to create a superimposed image. The process used two slide machines, a selection of mirrors, four-by-twos, bricks, duct tape and the kitchen table with its leaves out and its top pulled off. I was looking for similarities, matches, discontinuity and unlikely connections.
As a physical object, Roman Portraits is especially sympathetic to this process. It is printed on matt paper which soaks up the projected light rather than reflecting it. The printing is tonally very subtle, going from darkest blacks to faintest greys. This careful tonality helps to the mesh the two images, enhancing the projected slides by giving them a sense of three-dimensional modelling where they overlap the printed faces.
From reading about Classical sculpture I knew that many of the statues which we think of as white marble were most likely covered in coloured paint when they were first made. This suggests a different reading of the sculptures, one which makes them more human and less divine. Illuminated Books tries to re-enliven or re-animate the portrait busts, and to re-colour them.
Looking back, I see that the work I have been doing in the last few years brings historical and contemporary images ever closer together: first as collages (Scenes from the Life of Christ), then as tableaux (Unknown Renaissance Portraits and Ressemblances Parlantes I & II), lately as superimpositions and videos. Now that I am at the point of having brought the images as close to each other as I can, touching skins so to speak, I am able to loosen the comparisons that had been becoming increasingly strict in my previous series. Some of the images in Illuminated Books make quite fanciful connections between their participants; but the proximity of the images smoothes over the disjunct. Superimposing the images forces a comparison of their makers’ relative understanding of beauty and their construction of likeness.
Projection is becoming increasingly important to me as a technique. It is a way of altering spaces, of playing with the illusory third dimension in which paintings and photographs live. In the video works, I have tried to enter that space myself, and look back into real space through the sculptures’ eyes. My recent work has been about looking at history and trying to construct or suggest new meanings for old images. The video work allows me to “step inside the head” of the past.