In preparation for the start of the course & to get our creative juices flowing, the class received an email from our tutor, Ria Stochel.
Hi All,
Can you bring into the first session that you will have with me on Friday afternoon 15th September :
Images you have taken in the past or can take over the next few days that illustrate or capture in a personal way that resonates with you
One of the following words:
- Beneath
- Relationship
- Deconstruction
- Broken
- Growth
The images can be brought in on a drive/memory key or be prints.
Thank you
Ria
Hmmmm. Have to admit, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to start thinking ‘creatively’. It had been a long Summer that didn’t involve a holiday of any kind. However, I knew I had to start at some point, so I gave it a go. I decided to bring some images from my Level 2 course entitled The Postcode Project. This was to illustrate my ‘growth’ as a photographer & the progress I’ve made.
Sure enough, I was rumbled. During our first class session with Ria, I knew that this wouldn’t cut it. My other classmates had made a bit more effort. For example, Carolyn’s delicate observations of her elderly father’s garden depicting the gradual decay of an untended space. Also, Petya’s beautiful photos for her final Level 3 project, Transformations. When they were compared to her images from an earlier project, you could see how Petya had developed & expanded on a unique technique & concept. I knew that I couldn’t just present a bunch of old pics under a pretext of a clichéd cop out.
Then I mentioned I’d taken some photos the Saturday before – would the class like to see them?
Yes, was the answer.
I’d recently taken a trip to Rotherhithe, London, to visit the Brunel Museum & see an installation by artists Anne Krinsky & Tom Pearman called Tide Line Thames.
This was a collaborative projected installation screened in the museum’s Thames Tunnel Shaft. Running for 15 minutes, the film merges Anne’s video footage of the River Thames with Tom’s animations.
According to Anne’s blog piece on her website (1), Anne’s images focus on the river’s architectural structures between high and low tide lines. Tom’s animations are of faux tunneling forms, inspired by Brunel’s Tunnel and Tunnel Shaft. The collaboration was a culminating exhibition of Anne’s two-year project which was supported by Arts Council England.
Anne met Tom on the New Creative Markets Programme, a mentoring scheme jointly funded by SPACE studios and the European Regional Development Fund. As their practices shared a passion for architecture and geometry, she learned a lot from this collaboration. Anne worked with video for the first time for this project and received technical advice and support from Levin Haegele and London Creative Network, a follow-up mentoring programme for artists working in new mediums.
This is why I knew I had to see this installation, especially with my own obsession with the River Thames. This was also a place in London I’d never visited before.
The Thames Tunnel shaft is a unique London structure. It’s quite wide & deep, with soot -covered, pock-marked walls. When I arrived, Anne was just setting up the projection with the help of her husband. This was my first impression taken with my mobile phone’s camera.
I made my way down the stairs to see it straight on. It was quite transfixing looking at the video images & how they played with the overlaying animations. I then took some photos with the Nikon D5500 DSLR.
While taking in the images & taking photos, I had the pleasure of chatting with Anne. During the conversation she mentioned that there was a second part of this exhibition that I could see over in Canary Wharf. Called Tropical Thames, this installation consists of large-scale digital prints on aluminium panels that was created especially for & placed within the Crossrail Place Roof Garden.
Guess where I was off to next…
The Crossrail Place building, designed by Foster & Partners, is a weird & wonderful piece of contemporary architecture. Resembling a permanently anchored cruise ship, it tops one of the Crossrail stations. Filled with bars, cafés, a cinema, bike shop, offices & other facilities, it’s definitely a ‘living’ building rather than just another City office block.
The building’s Roof Garden is a great space – bit of green in a block of grey. Anne’s Tropical Thames certainly brightened up the garden on a dull day.
As with Tide Line Thames, the imagery is inspired by the architectural structures of the River Thames. Anne has combined & manipulated colour, texture & composition to create some quite memorable pieces.
After taking in these bright flashes of colour, I then started making my way round the building & captured some observations.
Later on that day, I had a play with some of the images & came up with the following. All I’ve done is given them a basic black & white conversion with a neatening crop.
These are the images I showed to Ria & the class.
After a positive response & some constructive criticism, I felt ‘back in the game’. The word that Ria suggested these images responded to was Beneath. The image that brought this out was the black & white version of the Tide Line Thames photo. You can see the texture & shape of the tunnel shaft’s wall coming through, adding an extra dimension ‘beneath’.
As Ria pointed out, this may not be something that can be utilised for the first Unit’s project, but could be filed for future reference. I think I’ll definitely be exploring this at some point during the course.
1: https://www.annekrinsky.com/
Photo Arcturus 