MA Studies
Contemporary Art Practice: Moving Image
Royal College of Art
2019-21

It was on March 16th 2020 that I left London, realising that this exodus would result in me having zero means of word processing and zoom calling, in haste I purchased a cheap Chromebook from an Argos in Fulham Broadway. My first response to the lockdown would be a piece titled Traeth (which is the Welsh word for beach). The work consisted of a series of short frame-lapse recordings made within my lockdown room over a seven day period – an honest representation of escapism, combined with foreboding desolation of reality, a stark contrast to the vibrancy of London and the RCA.

Using the Chromebook for video editing was simplistic, basic and also cumbersome; through some persistence the desolate piece I had envisaged came to light. Traeth would become an embryonic piece for my studies.

As the virus storm turned into a blizzard we all sheltered, we holed-up, we waited it out. An eerie crisp dawn beckoned, a raw dark event horizon, spawning fresh ‘pre’ and ‘post’ dual parlances; pre-covid, post-covid; pre-lockdown, post-lockdown. As confinement continued to rumble, the ‘pre-covid’ or ‘pre-lockdown’ discourses faded, submerged in a dense fog – a strange bizarre sensation of feeling like the events of a month ago actually occurred many years ago.

Time was behaving obtusely, our new cave-dwelling internment was crystallising our inter-relationship with structured time. The suppressive, coercive weekly linguistic loop (days of the week) mutated, becoming irrelevant, null-and-void, obsolete. Certainly from my own perspective from the outset every day radiated that melancholic, dreary Monday feeling, the week refusing to splutter into motion.

Constant exposure to bleak global news helped to commission, to certify, to authorise one’s own dark thoughts. Dwelling on one’s own mortality became my step one in the book of how to deal with a pandemic; reviewing ones own life was step two. Whilst listening to Robert Macfarlane’s Underland (via audiobook) a line ironically glows brightly, “Here in the shadows, space and time spill into one another”. When normal life is interrupted and paused, time’s choir sings an array of diverse pulses, without rhythm, and we can start to listen to time’s true identity.

Pre-lockdown my work had been drenched for years in dialogues surrounding repetition. I was fascinated with multi-layered aesthetics and mesmeric semantic-satiation, but through the bleakness of my fresh reality, repetition would be stripped back to its underlying component flow, ‘time’. My aesthetic focus shifted too interrogating that interplay between constructed time used to govern our existence (which I would dub as ‘anthropomorphised time’) and the poetic breathing complexities of organic time; mechanic versus organic

Pre-Present:Mid-Future:Post-Past was created for the CAP online festival Everything Forever. This composition is a collage combining several works, each component layer illustrates different time structures – the loop, the cycle and the chaotic; the layers commune with each other, both jostling and merging. Pre-Present:Mid-Future:Post-Past also maintains my own reflections of lockdown; idleness, melancholic repetition, and escapism. The title itself is packed full of dialogue and symbolism, a state of mind brought on by the lockdown. 

The contemporary Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli would become a key influencer within my practice. His 2016 book The Order Of Time discusses the problematic reasoning behind Newtonian theory, this is the theory that our current measurement of time is based on. He also discusses in detail the physical qualities time’s own organic form.

We actually have very limited number of perceived scientific facts or grounded acknowledgements with regards to time; one that is recognised is that time moves faster on top of a mountain than on the plains. One can place a mechanical clock on a table and another on the floor, leave them for a year and there will be slight recording differences. Now why this happens is still a mystery, though what it does show is that time is not a given, we are surrounded and consumed by ever-changing micro timezones. An aesthetic comparison could be to think of leaves on a tree blowing in the wind, a diverse array of moving tone, where each leaf is unique though as a collective they are one.

Duration

Whilst contemplating the important question of duration, a full 24hr, 7 day photographic time-lapse recording was instigated, a lockdown epic during the week of my 40th birthday. At the end of the recording I was left with thousands of photographs.

Frustration for me occurred when transferring the images across to the computer; in an instant the computer ordered the photos into a regimented image sequence, a process that felt coercively systemic. Not wanting to pander to this, I set about randomising the order of the photos and randomising the length of time for each photo. To achieve this required hand-placing each individual photograph onto a timeline. With 5,669 photos the process was labour intensive though one which added value to my research. Through engaging with this activity physical repetition was pronounced. Simultaneously highlighting the imbedded ordained linear constructs inherent within the moving image practice.

Carlo Rovelli discusses how we came to be where we are with our linear time set-up, he talks about a shift in mentality in which we went from treating time as a series of inter-connected events (a truer representation) to viewing time as a thing. This shift meant time could be perceived as controllable by man. Rovelli beautifully suggests that the cosmic dance performed by the Hindu god Shiva is a more accurate depiction of time.