If the projections and experiments staged at KMD in January 2018, marked both an articulation of the frustrations that had been building-up around my use of representations and the first tentative steps in reappraising the centrality of the image to my research inquiry, ‘The objects perform themselves’, created as part of a workshop run by Richard Launder, Jefford Horrigan, Peter McCaughey and Julia Collura, marked perhaps a more through-going albeit unrefined response in practice to those frustrations, marking a decisive move forward in my work by creating a different relationship between image and embodied, situated practice, which also decisively and explicitly moved my image-making beyond “collecting evidence” and into creating it.
The work used a collective performance (seen in the photographs, above) to assemble the sounds and objects which would ultimately become an installation, recorded using video (see, right).
On the sound-track of the video you can hear the repeated "chirrup" created by electronic smoke alarms which form a part of the installation. This work was also notable in that it marked an early example of my deliberate incorporation of past, autobiographical experience in my work-making (Here, the experience of moving through a building full of many dozens of failing smoke detectors), along with the then dominant visual motifs of my research; those objects (in this case chairs) whose affordances were redolent of absent bodily presence.
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