Itineraries

It's one year today since I left for a book-making residency at the Skaftfell Center in Iceland.

I wrote and thought and made so much there and about it since. It was, in the closing words of my diary of the time, strange, hard, rich and rewarding. 

Here are some (nearly) wordless poems that I've only just reassembled. I've finally run out of things to say about that time and place (for now). 

Look Up, Look Down, Look Sideways

One of the several hats I wear when I work is that of an arts workshop facilitator. Recently I had the very great pleasure of meeting lots of talented young people at the Museum of London's family festival. Taking inspiration from my interests in walking and digital arts, I encouraged them to look up, look down and look sideways as they travelled around the Museum, taking photographs and tracking themselves using GPS on an iPad. When they returned from their journey we looked at where the satellites thought they'd been and asked whether machines can really know where you are or remember where you've been. Does looking help you find yourself and the camera help you remember? What does your memory look like if you make one picture from it? Below is an overview of the stellar layered artworks I helped them create from their photographs.

Not that I play favourites...but these were some of my favourites.

Because glitter

Can't lie, it's because I was so flattered to be included in this one...(look past the neon skull).

Above and below were created by two sisters from the same walk. I love that they came up with  works that were similar but different from the images they shot together.

The starburst detail of the top image and the additional maps included in this make me very happy indeed.

The children printed off their images to take their art home. They also had the opportunity to further decorate the printouts; I liked the clash of the tactile, analogue world with that of the ephemeral, digital one - and the careful placement of these shiny stickers was so meticulously done!

Afterwards the Museum was kind enough to send me these images as well as the screenshots of the routes everyone walked (or that the bots thought they walked...) 

I am increasingly using walking not only as exercise, but as meditation and as a form of mindful activity aimed at rooting (ha!) myself more fully in my own life. Obviously this then expands into my artistic practice and photographic work because I can't help the one bleeding into the other. I'm making a series of 'walkwork' collages combined with digital drawing and photographs, which you can see some of on my Instagram. I'm not sure whether these 'routes' will be used for anything else in the future or if I will just carry on using them as a jumping-off point but here are several ways of looking at the 33 walks, using a variety of automated editing techniques. 

 
 

I run workshops for cultural organisations and in schools for the most part, but can happily design something for private groups too. Please do get in touch via my website if you are interested in finding out more.

You're just my (tin) type...what I've been up to lately

In the last month or two I've been making a bit of time each day to play with more personal work.

Very slowly I feel like I'm inching towards having something to say about this brilliant and infuriating thing we do with (or sometimes without!) cameras. Sometimes that means putting down my computer or my phone or my sweet little Olympus or my giant Canon lenses and picking up a brush, pair of scissors, and some glue to make collages, or a tin of watercolour blocks to do some painting. 

At night and on the train as I travel to and from the studio I'm swallowing books in a way that I haven't done for years; reading about the history of citrus farming in Italy, a novel about three African American sisters, a book about witchcraft, short stories about aliens coming to earth. 

I've seen some fantastic exhibitions and some very dull ones, pushing me to agree or disagree with outlook and method, to bring the cream of the matter to the top of the pint of opinion milk. I'm starting to learn to look in new ways, to think more broadly, to be open to unexpected connections and random occurrences. 

None of this is meant as a boast or a showy display of how ARTY I am, but rather to just say how lucky I feel for these days when I have space and time to explore in this way, and as a very lengthy intro to the photos you see in this post. 

Several years ago I took a workshop at Tate Modern, based around the work of Alighiero Boetti. I was drawn to his use of rules, his multidisciplinary practice, his playing off of the tension between order and disorder, chaos and control. Perhaps most importantly (for me, anyway) the results were absolutely beautiful artefacts. 

More recently I've been thinking about the interaction between digital and analogue technologies, about nostalgia, viscerality, craft versus art. This is manifesting in using apps to glitch photos and destroy images at a pixel level and conversely in a renewed love of PVA glue, papercraft and bookbinding.

I've written on this blog before about the magic of early photographic processes like tintypes or daguerrotypes when I documented gallerist Laura Noble's experience at the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam. In the last week or two I've been experimenting with using apps to recreate this effect. Some are the pictures you see above. How crazy is it to look so far backwards with such forward facing tech? Do we feel cheated because the process can be approximated at the touch of a button? What does it mean when I print them out, stick with shiny tape, rescan, pin on my wall as I have done here?

I don't have any answers yet and I'm not even certain of the questions I'm asking. All I know is I'm having a tremendous time trying to find out. On Friday I'm excited to introduce some workshop students to the magic of cyanotypes (sun willing!). We will also be snapping away on our smartphones and I'm really interested to see what they make of these two activities. Keeping my eyes open is the name of the game...

A few more experiments, with my ever patient studio mates:

Turns out I've been intrigued by these old processes for a while...when rummaging for paper to mount my latest snaps I uncovered this clipping from an Observer magazine I cut out about a million years ago. How alive does this man look? He could be someone you passed in the street this evening.

Other photographers are using these techniques to brilliant effect. One of Joni Sternbach's tintypes of surfers could be seen at this year's Taylor Wessing Prize exhibition(but this one of mer-people is my favourite).

Dreaming of summer

A few weeks before Christmas I found five French children's books in a box saying 'please take' on the street.  They are not really textbooks, more the 'funformation' sort of books my grandmother used to give my brother and I for Christmas. Anyway, they have brilliantly 80s illustrations and I have scanned some of them to make digital collages. Here's the first. Creamy blue and sunshine yellow, a somersaulting girl and a wave of sound, bound by a neuron. It reminds me of a photo I took years and years ago on the shores of Lake Geneva, which I don't have a scan of but did describe on an old blog: here.

Evil Galaxy Parrot (homage to Cornell)

The first time I visited Venice* I took a rather tortuous route to the Guggenheim and saw two pieces of artwork that have lingered with me longer than almost any other I've seen. 

One was a coppery slash of metal by Lucio Fontana which flung reflections of that special milky canal light around the garden exhibition room and relieved the ache of muscles that had turned down too many blind alleys that day. The other was a painted box containing a mildly ridiculous fortune-telling bird crafted by Joseph Cornell. 

When I saw the parrot above lurking on a shadowy pub ledge I was instantly reminded of that box, that bird, that day; I had to create my own little photographic version.

*I do realise how DAAAAHHHLING that sounds

Brewing

Amy Lord and I are cooking up a little something together. Amy will be presenting 'the weirdest adventure that Standon Calling has ever seen' in August.

Order and Chance

I recently completed a five-week evening course at the Tate Modern. Each session, led by artist Sarah Sparkes, looked at a different aspect of the work of artist Alighiero Boetti, currently in exhibition at the gallery. We all made work inspired by the themes that intrigued him - grids, ordering, chance happenings, games, collages, repetition, mark-making and more. At the end of the course we held a small exhibition for friends and family at the top of the Tate building. Below are some images of the creators and their work.

 

A group-created artwork

 

The pieces below are mine.

 

The large piece on the easel is what I would call my final piece - double-exposed photographic prints cut up and rearranged according to certain rules. The final piece is unfortunately too big for my scanner but I've posted my preliminary tests below (you can see where they were displayed on the floor to left and right of the easel). 

(Sorry about the wonky scans)