While living and working as a practicing photographer it is increasingly difficult to concentrate and dedicate time to producing work of a personal nature. Time and life goes by and it goes by and it goes by and then there is no time or life left. While it is beneficial and forever fascinating to work for clients, to be able to produce work from my insides forms the foundations of my practice. Lady into Hut allows me to remove myself from 'society' and absorb my surroundings without constraints.
Having been honoured to exhibit at Casa des Artes in Tavira, Portugal in August 2012, I then showed during Photomonth (East London) in October 2012 including new work produced a month before. Here is a photograph of the installation.
In the coming months I will travel to the hut to see what happens next.
Thoughts on the 'Artist Statement':
As I read my words from three months ago, I find it interesting how as the work progresses and I spend more time on the project, the statement also moves and changes. If I wrote it now it would be very different.
So here it is for my own reference and can be compared to what form the work embodies in the future and a new statement I am bound to write...
The hut sits quietly in the hills as the valley moves and sighs, but it sits with the effect of a monumental tomb. Defiant. Lavishing its influence, denying its love.
The hut encompasses a person. The overwhelming influence of this place and the loss of its creative patriarch are worked through and transformed into a new legacy through the experience of being and photographing a physical place.
Removed from civilisation to observe, to direct ones gaze. The act and state of looking transforms ones mental attitude or view. Reacting to and experiencing the movements, the sighs, the influence.
Lady into Hut is about transformation. Empirically being, photographing and becoming a place.
“Transformation stories are the means by which we make sense of the world, how we see the connections that, ‘the materialisation of our age’ misses, and they belong to the universe that is ordered, not by reason alone, but by imagination, a universe in which change is the only constant”
John Burnside, foreword [2008], Lady into Fox by David Garnett
Lady into Hut is a work in progress, 2012.
