As mentioned, earlier this week, I was invited to take part in an artist’s talk with Maria Ahmed, hosted by Lucy Soutter at Photofusion. It was great to see people attend who I’ve not seen in a while. And it was wonderful that a key take-away seemed to be that Maria and I are having a lot of fun. Maria and I have plans to work together – watch this space! Massive thanks to all involved for including me.
Thanks to fellow MA student, Sophie Anna Gibbings for this pic. You can see more on Maria’s Instagram feed and a short recording by Anastasia Tikhonova on my Stories.
I continue to develop ://LAMELLA. Frustratingly, I had so much on this week, that I missed out on other artists’ talks and a conference, which might have been incredibly helpful, in particular one about motherhood and the death drive – the narrative of which informs my project. I have been weighing up how much or how little this narrative needs to be overtly included, if at all. “Show, don’t tell” keeps popping into my mind. There is so much information swirling around my head, perhaps attending the talks would have added too much in an already overburdened head and project.
I have been pruning (not my head, which is being pruned by age anyway, so doesn’t need any additional hacking, but the project!) And I’ve become increasingly aware that I work with these AI images as if I were editing and sequencing traditional photographs; positioning them together, deleting, letting go of favourites that simply don’t seem to fit, allowing the images to speak for themselves. There are arguments for and against such a strategy. Nevertheless, I am also still making decisions about how to install the work at my graduation show (having decided it will be the ://LAMELLA work and not dialogues for one). What will work off the screen in a room? Will they function off the web, but on screens as an installation, at all? Trying to install them earlier this week at college was a flipping pain, and they went quite awry. Will I change my mind at the last possible moment, because it’s all too difficult? Figuring out how and if to install this work offline is proving more challenging than I imagined, although I enjoyed some surprising developments earlier this week when I nailed one of the books that feeds the AI database I have been using to generate the images to the wall.
A surprising development – I wonder if I might include something of this in an installation: Obstetrics for Nurses nailed to the wall.
I am exceedingly pleased to say I have secured sponsorship from Hahnemühle, who kindly agreed to supply the paper I need for the MA Graduation show. Thank you so much to them! And I have begun talks with a local media company who may provide screens. Having decided I won’t use screens after all earlier this week, if I can secure a couple of reliable suitable flat-screen TVs, I’d like to try something that has not emerged fully yet – recording myself reading the text I’ve written, currently included on the ://LAMELLA site.
Finally, I am also pleased to say I have sold over thirty, and given away a handful of dialogues for one. I’ve had some lovely feedback – thank you! From my friend John Umney, I particularly appreciated how he recognised the speakers’ desire “to expose one another’s flaws, both of comprehension and intellect.” Yes!! In this day and age of pontificating and sanctimonious certainty on social media, I am so pleased this came across in the dialogue between the “I and non-I”, a manifestation of this individual writer’s assertion that we cannot always be so certain; that we must retain humility, curiosity and the knowledge that we might, at any point, be wrong. If you are interested in one of the few remaining copies, you can order here.
More news soon. In the meantime, please visit the latest iteration of ://LAMELLA here.
In a bid to figure out what might work off screen, I printed some test prints on Hahnemühle William Turner Matt Fine Art paper (which I’ve used for many years). This prompted me to ask Hahnemühle if they would sponsor my graduation show, by providing the paper allowing me to print quite large, and they have kindly agreed!