Biography
At the core of my practice are ideas of time, colour and light. I continually re-work these ideas in different contexts and places. In Dusseldorf (2004) my research focused on the private garden of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi a Transcendentalist Philosopher of Enlightenment Germany and a personal friend of Goethe. During darkness I produced a series of long exposure photographic and video works that used differing light sources as the carrier for my ideas, referencing the philosophical ghosts of Goethe and Jacobi who had used the garden to exchange ideas. In November 2007 I made a new video performance work Peloton, for the Radiance Festival, Glasgow. The work, a form of social sculpture was a nocturnal performance in Kelvingrove Park, Glasgow in which a group of cyclists (20+) rode bikes fitted with a blue neon tube activated by each rider’s forward motion. Sir William Ramsay (1852-1916) discovered neon at this site in 1898. Collectively the choreographed cyclists gradually illuminate the black space of the park into a vortex of blue light. Subsequently projected in a partially derelict urban site in the Cities East End, the film became a portable, shifting cipher for time, energy and unidentifiable collective presence. Most recently in a show entitled Nuomena-Neomena at Several Pursuits, Berlin (September-October 2009). I developed work from photographs taken whilst on a short residency at Gropiusstadt, a modernist high-rise designed by Walter Gropius on the edge of south west Berlin. I am fascinated in the possibility of photography to bridge times and places and its ability to freeze time and record and absorb light. I took many long exposure photographs of myself moving in darkness and from the resultant images made 2 neon pieces informed from the photographic condensations and residues of my actions. The neon pieces were called ‘this is not a reflection 1 and 11’. One piece was activated by the recorded sound of a video piece where the image was hidden in a large burnt wooden sculpture in the form of a wedge. The title of the show is a play on a word (nuoumenon) used by Immanuel Kant (an Enlightentment Philosopher) broadly meaning an objective reality beyond our own consciousness that can never be accessed.