St Peter’s House Library Visit 23 October
“All artworks, as all things, are made in the same way. A person will collect ideas, objects, and people and bring those pieces together to start making an uncharted mess. Play and imagination , the unusual, and doubt sink into the slits of crafting anything. We don’t stop pushing around that mess until it’s a pile of parts and bits, thoughtful shavings of what we hope to reveal. Then we step back, we look at that mess, and we engineer our playfulness. We refine and focus our play and pull together the disarray and uncontrollable so that it can find its potential, and so we can see it for what it’s becoming. We begin to understand the things we wish to express. A narrative is exposed.” Efrem Zelony-Mindel pages 58 FOAM issue 54
With time to spare it seemed the best things to do would be to research something at St Peter’s. I also wanted to look at the BJP Magazine but instead found FOAM Magazine, a huge tome of a journal and one that took me right back to Amsterdam when we went with students from Brighton University in February and visit the photography gallery at FOAM.
Rosana Paulino - Red Atlantic
I forgot to photo the blurb in this instance but reference to Black heritage and history including the slave trade came to the fore in Rosana’s work. I liked the way photographs here are woven with material artefacts, the shapes and arrangements on the page to the fore, and it is clear, without text, that deep narratives are interwoven in amongst the choices and arrangements, a page from a book (an Orchid), tiles and material all carefully placed together with photos. What I can take from this is the need to focus on selecting artefacts with care to the inter-relation and look to the stories they create just by selecting and curating them together. Then for each image I wish to try photographing them in one take, changing my photoshop method to a more organic and free approach, moving the artefacts around the area, combining, adding or deleting whatever feels the right thing to do. This can also add spontaneity and happenstance.
Looking at her vast archive of mundane images, Quaresma started intervening with the surfaces of her photos injecting them with impulsiveness interferences, strokes of paint, scraps of paper, paper cut-outs and other ephemera. A reminder to me how that there are no rules here, unusual ideas and experimentation should be tried.
I then moved on in the library by typing ‘Objects’ into the search and came up with these three books.
OBJECTS (book) John Gruen
One paragraph on the inner sleeve of the book wrap is all you get here, instead, with a simple written title, the photos are allowed to be without textural analysis. Dark moody photos of arranged objects provoke curiousity and the hint of a narrative. It’s a reminder to self of the powerful images arranged objects in a space can make. But in this instance it is not the studio glare so much as the half light and darkness through which we visit Gruen’s work.
OBJECTS OF BEAUTY Joy Gregory
Gregory photographically explores issues of femininity and her ethnic roots by arranging items and also photographing them using differing techniques such photograms, cyanotype, negative exposure as well as more conventional, and yet distressed looking photos. There is texture here and it all helps to add atmosphere.
