Work

Relative Space

‘Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.’ Friedrich Nietzsche

The work is concerned with the relationship between a father and son as seen through the eyes of their wife and mother of forty years. Family relationships are defined over time by experience and moulded by received notions from the proliferation of fact and fiction prevalent today. The work tries to disrupt the familiar and often fixed nature of long term relationship by manipulating the parameters of looking within the language of photography and film.

‘Relative Space’ alludes to the distance that can develop in family relationships over time and to the central space between the figures. This is not the shadow play of Plato’s cave waiting for external enlightenment, but rather related to Heidegger’s jug parable where the essential, unique ‘being’ of the vessel lies not in its clay walls, but in the space it contains. It reflects the enigma of the void, negative space, used by artists through history to grapple with ideas of existence, with presence and absence, with infinity and death. Here its empty negative aspect is turned to positive use as a place for contemplation where there might be the possibility of change in fixed, stuck thought patterns.

Time is at the heart of the work. It is a time which inhabits the border between the photographic and cinematic. The still camera becomes a witness to time passing rather than the index of an event. There is resonance in the early repetitions of Marey and Muybridge’s images which attempted to scientifically analyse movement by breaking it down frame by frame. The animations use still images taken over a short space of time and expanded in film software to slowly repeating endless loops. They reflect the claustrophobia and frustration of family relationship whilst encouraging a slowing down of thought and the uncovering of possible new unconscious meaning to emerge.

The work explores strategies to circumvent expectations of the familiar. The attention of the viewer is extended in the movement from one figure to the other and the eventual settling in the central space. It is defocused away from the defined roles of the figures as father and son. As the surface shifts the work makes room for the possibility of alternative meanings for ‘father’, ‘’son’, wife’ and ‘mother’.

Father/Son

The animation is made up of still images taken over a twenty second period expanded to ten minutes and looped. The figures are defined by the title, but placed in a slightly ambiguous, empty domestic setting so that very little substance can be attached to them as individuals. Attempts to define them are further subverted by their lack of distinguishing clothes. The muted tonal values of the work echo the simplicity of early frescoes and again try to pare down expected meaning.

Both figures look outwards at different moments. The start and finish of each loop is marked by the gaze of one figure and there is a moment of defiance in the turned looking out of the other, half way through. It is a performance where the artist’s role, of wife and mother, trying to keep everything under control, is reflected in the wall text which documents her attempts to direct the work.

Son/Husband

In this animation, the stills were again taken over a short period of real time, but here, their duration varies and they repeat for different periods. Time is stretched and distorted in this repetition and resequencing so that the frames are removed from linear time completely. Narrative is implied by the successive images but subverted in the disrupted repetitions.

Elements of recognisable gestures trigger memory and take on disquieting echoes. The viewer is held by the shifting gazes of the subjects replacing the viewpoint of the artist, the mother/wife of the subjects, whose fears are reflected in the accompanying wall text.

The double portraits are intended not merely as film stills, but to be the beginning of a process of looking in order to try and subvert long held beliefs. Ideally the viewer would see them first out of sight of the film and after looking from one to the other to recognise differences, carry the memory to the viewing of the film.

….breathing, waiting, breathing, waiting, watching. They are looking away, looking down, they don’t want to wait any longer. Why? Son looks back but husband keeps looking away. Why? Breathing. Mouths open, ready to speak, no words, no sound. Something happens, son looks angry, upset, husband closes eyes. Look out and again angry, upset, eyes closed. Look out, angry, upset, eyes closed. Shock. Why? Heads shake, ‘no’, ‘no’, ‘no’. Shoulders shrug, ‘whatever’, ‘whatever’. Breathing, waiting, breathing, waiting, watching…….

Photography