Photography, mainly. That’s been my strapline for as long as I can remember. Here on my website, my business cards, my social media bios. My practice as an artist has always centred on photography. My work has occasionally edged into other media such as printmaking and drawing, but it always circles back round to photography again. It’s what I do. My thing. But recently, I’ve started tentatively adding ‘and video/moving image artist’ to my well-worn self-description as a photographer. I’m feeling a pull away from my familiar, comfortable, well-loved terrain of the static photograph, into something more fluid, more nebulous, and more unknown… And as I’ve begun dipping a toe into moving image art, I’ve begun to realise how much there is to learn, how much potential moving image has as an art form, and how much there is to be discovered. And that excites me, a lot.
My photography practice has historically centred on a re-imagining of the everyday, seeking to move beyond habitual ways of seeing the world around us. A move away from (to quote Dr Amy Cutler in her article Square Eyes, Square Landscapes in MIA Journal May 2020) “those received ideas… we seem to sleepwalk through” and towards something approximating direct perception, uncluttered by labels and conditioned preferences. I’m fascinated by this as a possibility - that we could potentially rest in the gap between seeing and knowing and just be with our direct experience of imagery - and what impact this could potentially have on the rest of our lives. Could a creative practice of tuning into this gap between seeing and knowing have a ripple effect into other aspects of our lives - could we learn to be more present, mindful and accepting of what is, rather than instantly grasping or pushing away our experiences based on habitual responses…? I don’t know the answer, but it’s a constant and thought-provoking source of inspiration in my work.
Image from ‘Between Seeing and Knowing’
My interest in moving image began in the autumn/winter of 2020. I’d recently begun a year-long Postgraduate Programme in Creative Practice at independent art school Artpocket, and at a time of seemingly interminable lockdowns and social restrictions, I found myself working remotely on a collaborative project with the rest of the course cohort. A collaborative film was suggested, and we pooled our ideas along with mobile phone video clips, stop-motion videos, animations, photographs and music, and after many hours of concentrated editing via Zoom screenshare, we found we had created something unexpectedly profound. Exploring loss, memory, letting go and our hopes and intentions for the future, the film was meaningful to all of us in ways I don’t think any of us had expected - and evoked feelings and atmosphere in a way that I don’t think would have been possible through static imagery alone.
Still from collaborative film - Sky above me, Earth below me, Fire within me, Water around me.
Fast forward a month or two, and as we entered the third national lockdown and the depths of winter, I found myself increasingly drawn to a small patch of woodland in my local area as a focus for my art practice. Partly due to its proximity (a five minute walk from my house made it a natural location for those ‘stay local’ lockdown walks). And partly, because it was about to change irrevocably. This tiny, scrubby patch of woodland with its narrow, muddy desire path which cut a corner off a well-established cycle track, was about to be temporarily off-limits due to tree-felling and development, including the creation of a two metre wide tarmac path which would make the cycle route more direct. To me, at that time, this felt like a huge loss. This small and seemingly insignificant patch of trees had become something of a refuge to me during those difficult locked-down months. With it’s narrow, muddy, sometimes flooded path, trip-hazard tree roots snaking underfoot and ivy trailing from tree branches that met overhead, it was the last oasis of relatively undisturbed nature before my route took me back to the busy road that led towards home - and it was the part of my daily walks that I most looked forward to.
So I began to document it. Through photographs, drawings, videos and sound recordings, I began to build up a record of the area before; during (by walking the perimeter fence); and after the development work was completed. Over a period of months this small local patch of land grew into something of a symbol to me - a microcosm of the way the human/nature relationship often plays out in the wider world, where nature is often seen as ‘other’ and separate, something to be tamed, controlled or dominated. It was also reflective of our increasing separation from nature in a world dominated by screens - nature viewed through pixels. Following a group crit where many people described the ‘push and pull’ and ‘tug of war’ between humans and nature they saw in my work, and using words such as ‘winning’, ‘losing’ and ‘battle’, I started thinking more deeply about the way we view and describe nature - that separateness, the nature/culture dualism that is so prevalent in our society. And how unhelpful this is in terms of our attitude to nature and the environment - we can say we’re ‘on the side of nature’ - but if we’re constantly conditioned to see ourselves as separate from nature, and therefore nature winning means us losing - can we ever really, truly want what’s best for the planet as a whole?
The work that came out of this project, titled ‘Dis/connection’, seeks to explore the complex interplay between humans and nature. I’ve become increasingly interested in the role art may have to play in breaking down the perceived separateness and deconstructing the dominant narrative of nature/culture dualism - and what impact this might have on our collective response to nature and the environment.
While I haven’t widely shared them, the moving image sequences I created were some of the most powerful pieces of work to come out of this project. While I was moving into the realms of the philosophical and ecological in my research and thinking, the numerous short films I was making helped to keep me connected to the personal within the project - where it all began with my sadness at the loss of this little patch of land as I knew it - and allowed me to process my feelings, while also considering a bigger picture.
Film still from ‘Dis/connection’ project.
Film still from ‘Dis/connection’ project.
It was through this project that the idea of reimagining landscape started to emerge. While my work had historically focussed on reframing the everyday, and the personal impact this might have, I now found myself concerned with a broader framework, both in terms of content - the landscape - and concept - the potential impact on our response to the big environmental issues of our time.
My most recent moving image work has started to delve deeper into the idea of challenging our habitual ways of seeing landscape. Through layering and abstraction of landscapes that are very familiar to me, I’m trying to re-learn how I see them, and how I experience them. As Amy Cutler says in Square Eyes, Square Landscapes, “the telling of stories of landscape requires all of our learning practices. So does the undoing of these stories.” This is what I am trying to do with my current, as yet untitled work. Undoing the stories of the Norfolk landscape that I have long felt somewhat ambivalent about, that have become so familiar during my life here that I don’t just take them for granted, I often don’t really even see them.
And a re-framing is occurring. This is in part through the intentionality of creating films. More often that not now, I find myself really looking at a landscape that I might once have just ‘sleepwalked’ through. Noticing the moving, intertwining, ever changing details. The constantly shifting interplay between that which we think of as ‘nature’ and that which we label ‘manmade’. The wide open expanses contrasting with the tiniest of close-up details. And really listening to the sounds - the birds, the voices, the wind in the trees, the lapping of water, the unidentifiable creaks and thuds and murmurs of the world. And in part it’s through taking the raw material that I gather, and interweaving it, layering it, combining it to create a new version of what is so familiar. And I wonder what the wider impact of this might be. As Robert Macfarlane says in Speaking the Anthropocene (Emergence Magazine, May 2019), “landscapes that are generically apprehended and generically described are more vulnerable to misuse.” As a writer, Macfarlane is referring to written and verbal descriptions - but could the same be true of visual descriptions? Could the visual and auditory reframing of familiar landscapes jolt people out of their habitual indifference to a space, and start to “restore the eerie… where our narratives and ways of knowing fail; where the legibility of the environment accepts a gap or pause” (Amy Cutler, Square Eyes, Square Landscapes)? And could this gap or pause - this space between seeing and knowing I started exploring so many years ago through everyday objects - allow us the opportunity to experience these landscapes in a new way, and perhaps appreciate them, care about them, want to look after them in ways we haven’t before? Once again, my work raises more questions than it answers. And with so much still to learn, that feels exactly the way it should be.
For more of my moving image work, including experimental short films, snippets and works-in-progress, please visit my Vimeo page.