new work blurb

Recent work has developed my explorations of the dialectic between the digital and the hand made. Digital drawings and found graphics merge with painstakingly obsessive hand rendered tracing of motifs and messages from my travels around the internet; more specifically how I live my personal life by communicating via technology. Snippets of text from emails and text messages from lovers/potential lovers are abstracted and re-presented in animated montages. I have been interested in examining notions of materiality/immateriality through the cyclical process of making these drawings and animations. The starting point may be a photograph that I have taken of a text message, or a screen grab of an email, which is then fed into the computer and projected onto the wall or printed out for me to trace. I then photograph or scan the image, and it is subjected to a ‘re-drawing’ with the digital tools – simulacra of real tools – and then projected as a slide show of confused and sometimes ambiguous imagery. This process weaves in and out of the material and immaterial, the original and the copy (which is which?). These communications (and the nature of human relationships) are so fleeting and temporal; I pin them down by hand rendering them, I assimilate them into my own visual language. I then destroy this by taking away the materiality of the hand rendered drawing through presenting them projected on the wall….they are inaccessible, and non existent.

MA Degree Show Evaluation

The installation 'the ecstacy of communication' that I have presented for assessment resolves some of my intentions for the work;display and presentation in a space, the use of simultaneous projections, and the use of entirely digital content - without the presence of the 'actual' drawings.


Problematic aspects include;
Logistics of placement of projectors - angle of projection, positioning, the lack of a third projector to fill the space with content as I had envisaged
Pace of films - I had intended to further edit the films to play with pace, flickering and looping of material to create more dynamic animations, and refer to entertainment media.
Content of films/narrative
Aspect ratio technical issues - some images are presented as widescreen, some are not - this leads to a certain amount of 'stretch and squash'

However, the work has developed aspects of the content that I wanted to resolve. By using personal information such as snippets of my text and email conversations I feel that this reconciles the technology to human experience. In past work the process was more important than the content and I didn't find a focal point for my ideas in order to explore that process.