There is not one single theme, nor a sense of a ‘centre’ in the making of my work, whether it is a single screen video, a video installation or a photo work. Therefore, what is made is the culmination of a multiple set of ideas using fragmented, associated imagery that comes together in a process of making while thinking. Associations are made through the construction of a critical assemblage, a form of ‘acute’ juxtaposition of linear narrative. The ‘politics’ at work is embedded rather than dictated through the sense of the process itself, in the choice of aesthetic, technical decision making, subject matter, editing and distribution.
The videos lock onto a sense of the cinematic in an appropriation of the intense ‘visuality’ of cinematic constructions, in doing so it consciously exploits our recognition of visual strategies and narrative scenarios each of which triggers our memory banks into a false sense of security. We are placed in a position of control for what appears to be a familiar allowing us to be passive receivers, undisturbed and settled within the limits of our experience. However this is very short lived, complacency is comprehensively challenged, and jolted out of this state of comfortability. The tactic is one of disruption whereby entering into a kind of game, one of the recognisable and the unrecognisable finding ourselves on varying levels of spatial and psychological narrative awareness. Elements are derived from different unrelated sources; there is documentary footage as dispersed as political events, mainstream movies, scientific and medical material to the tracking of hurricanes and other natural disasters. Added to which is the use of found and original animation and real time material shot under direction and on location. There is always a possibility of an interruption instead of a conclusion and thereby it fulfils what has to be taken on board as being our own fragmented experience one which is not ordered and regimented but in which our state of consciousness flits and darts as it receives and processes stimuli and information and as Weber puts it missing the target can be more significant than hitting it. It is as if these video works operate between the reception point and the rationalisation point in our brains, the space between the raw and the filtered.
The making of the work stems from a kind intensive desire to collect in an age of information overload, a state of excess. But to acquire and collect suggests power, previous knowledge and an expertise. Instead my process of acquisition is informed by marginalisation rather than any system of knowledge based on control or order. My practice works towards, ‘creating or tracing a broader, possibly more fertile environment through close looking, rather than tracking a logical conclusion from the clues given’, to quote Mario Fusco. The video work is also about complexity, it is not about reduction but deliberately seeks to overwhelm, to suggest many possibilities and interpretations and a such avoids the notion of ‘oneness’ and singularity , no message is intended to be delivered , no fixed meanings intended to create a state of knowingness and stability. What is intended is that relations are constructed and developed that initially might seem unconnected, random selections of material that have their own particular histories and discourses but through concept and the practical activity of editing new relationships are established, other ways of thinking, connecting and acting are made visible. The photowork, whilst also engaging with these ideas and strategies, also involves a critique of the hegemony of photography, the information aspect of the photograph is often absent, a blurred and transient image which lacks complete information appears as though taken from a single frame from a moving images. The technical proficiencies of ‘good’ photography are set aside, opening up the specificity of the subject in process, in the act of becoming.
