Project Evaluation

The Invisible Line of Time

My intentions from the beginning of this project were to expand my knowledge into the subject of memory development and deterioration over time. The concept throughout this project has been underpinned by the idea of how memory fails to pay attention to days and dates, and instead it passes by years and stretches temporal distance and time.

Throughout my research, I have explored a wide range of practitioners of the arts including Timo Klos, Seigfried Kracauer, Uta Barth and Sigmud Freud. All of which express their thoughts and philosophies concerning the theme of memory and time. I usually find that my initial inspiration for a project comes from philosophical texts, for this project  there has been one text in particular that has been my main point of reference, that is Kracauer, Seigfried, ‘Photography’(1927), he talks of the stretches of memory over time and how this causes increases in transparency of the image recollection.  

For me the concept of the project and the process of producing the artwork work collectively, developing ideas by working across disciplines. Within this project, I have formed a body of work that consists of drawing, film recordings, photography and textile sampling; these have been the ways in which I have explored ways to express notions of time and memory through the material and immaterial.

I have found the Live Briefs especially useful experiences, they allowed me to think quickly about how to gather ideas together quickly in order to create an aesthetically thought provoking piece of work. The idea of producing work at such a pace, caused me to lose the importance of the journey of the process, and became more focused on the materiality; however I learned that I am able to carry out this way of working to produce work I would be satisfied to exhibit. This also encouraged me to think about the use of space, and the practicalities of creating an installation for a commission and not just as a piece of art.

Through the use of film documentation the other elements of my sampling processes became a collective formation of both the image, concept and process, allowing a narrative to form through the representation of the film as a stretch of time. Image making has been a crucial part of my documentation of time, with the 35mm film camera I believe this emphasised the importance of capturing an experience in that exact moment, without any form of manipulation, with only the natural manipulations of time and light embedded into the image. In addition to the image making, I find working with three dimensional sculpting an interesting way to develop a representation of a concept, making castings of objects was a way of representing the more abstract elements to the theme of time, by creating a solid object from the inspiration of a moveable form. These processes have at times been somewhat unreliable forms of documentation; however I believe that this is exactly what memories are representative of; the uncertainty and the gradual emergence of an event or happening.

I intend to develop my use of film recording, image making and three-dimensional processing through the use of more specialised materials such as 16mm film manipulation, slide projection and also the use of ceramics within my samples in order to create a finalised collective installation.