About the work

My work throughout this semester has been a continuation of the previous semester's ideas and themes revolving around using light as a function for drawing. Much of the work I created last semester focussed strongly on a few images I found on negatives that I had developed in Hong Kong. The few negative frames were not printed but I found these the most fascinating of the images I had taken in Hong Kong. They depicted light blurs of Hong Kong's skyscrapers at Victoria Harbour, and gave a strong sense of the perpetual feeling of movement I felt surging through Hong Kong. From this I started to make work revolving around the light traces as a method of mapping a journey through an urban landscape, and developed detailed then simplistic large scale drawings, using pencil and chalk on blackboards to capture a sense of a fleeting moment. I also started to develop work looking at involving artificial lights, and making perforations in the canvas and drilling through wooden boards, with a light source/ sources in the background. I started to look at the work of Laura Adel Johnson and Hugo Dalton and how they combined lights and projected lighting into large scale drawings (above bottom 2 images).

I did however this semester want to explore further the boundaries of physical drawing and using other methods to create drawings about light and the transient urban experience. I also had a new city, Krakow, to be able to explore in terms of lighting and through photographic drawing. I also wanted to produce drawings that were not a place or object but about implied motion. I started to read about drawing as an action in the work of contemporary artist, Emma Pearce, and how she valued drawing as a physical exercise, with each gesture, line and mark a trace and tracking point of the translation of actions. In a sense, I wanted to produce drawings that were traces and tracks of the lights within the city. I carried on manipulating photography as a tool for drawing, and worked with film and digital cameras to achieve interesting forms and marks of light. Unlike last semester for which I solely worked in black and white, as I wanted to wipe out all of the colour of Hong Kong to create an eery setting, almost unrecognisable and ambiguous, this semester I brought colour into the work. Although my black and white film pieces have a mysterious quality, the colour prints are almost like futurist painting, and I liked the vibrant dynamic colours in the prints. I also thought that through the pin prick layered photographic drawings, using artificial light through the back of the coloured pieces would give an interesting display of illuminated light in the pieces.

From the photographs I started to work with the idea of pin-hole drawings, and using fine holes of light to define the light blurs and traces. Employing physical light into the drawings gives a greater three - dimensionality to the drawings with the light acting as the drawing itself. I found my white paper pin hole pieces interesting, as not until you put the paper up to the light can you reveal an action occurring on the paper. I also experimented with other papers and tin foil for which the reflective quality interested me through the potential of reflecting the existing landscape into the piece of work. This made me assess about how and where I displayed the pieces of work. Whist out walking in Krakow I found an alleyway with spherical light boxes, and decided to photograph my pin hole pictures there. Bringing back my work into an urban setting gave me more ideas of using existing city lights in my drawing. I am also now working on producing larger scale pin pricks to cover the light boxes in the alley way, and shall be making an exhibition of the work in a few weeks.

I recently became fascinated with Amparo Sard's pin-prickworks (pin-prick image above) and the level of detail and pixellated blur quality of the drawings. To develop and continue with the pin-holes I will experiment more with the shapes and sizes of the holes allowing for varied intensity of light strands through the drawings. I also looked at the huge-scaled work of Christine Nguyen, who created huge photographic works illuminated from the background as well as small-scaled pin-hole works (above - black pin-hole piece). The larger-scale works, have forced me to think bout the scale and overall sensual experience achieved through my work, and I can understand the need to work larger than the A2/3 format I have produced on my exchange. It has been difficult to produce work without a studio and with a small bedroom in Krakow, and I now fully appreciate the space given to me in Newcastle. I know I want to produce very large-scale room-sized pin hole drawings and play with artificial background and projected light but I can not experiment with this until I am back in the UK.

In terms of what is next for my work, I shall be looking at visually exploring the symptomatic qualities of synaesthesia, and recording the the sensual awareness of urban city reactions of ephemeral light. This may involve looking more into motion imagery than still like photographs and drawings, or even creating an animation piece of the large light projection drawings. I also want to work more with reflective surfaces and drilling through mirrors, and projecting light as well as refracting light with the mirrors at angles to create an atmospheric setting or city-scape. This will be take a fair amount of investigative and logical working out but could look effective as an installation.

I understand that I am working with a lot of different ideas and practices but I am appreciating that my practice has become more about an exploration of drawing and dynamic marks, and so continually exploring different media is and will progressively be more important in the next few months and year.

Click on the pages in the right corner of the blog to view the various aspects I have been working on in my placement in Krakow.