BLOCKING PASSING

Folkestone 2017

This is not the film I intended to make. In fact I rarely, if ever complete a work to plan. This work is a continuation of a project I first started in East Ham technical college in 1972. I made a series of drawings/diagrams/scores to explain to myself the idea of repetition, blocking and passing. The drawings I made then are in fact very close to the kinds of drawings I do now.

Every artist has a favourite set of half-truths and mis-spoken, half memories that makes their work seem important and relevant and some how part of the linear history of art. It makes us feel necessary. 

This work is part of a process that will continue to evolve into a live performative work. I have made works before that exists not only as a stand-alone video work but also metamorphosis into a live work with performers and musicians. This is another one of those.

In this piece, I wanted the experiment to be how to use video and sound together and to look basically at pauses: At the gaps between what we see and hear. 

My collaboration over the years with musicians, composers and dancers has increased my curiosity. What interests me as a visual artists (whatever that means) is that at some point for me, it usually comes back to drawing.

The basic term we all use, moving image is wrong, the image never moves, we move, our brain holds the still image and blurs it with the next.

So the experiment in this work Blocking Passing is not fundamental. I am not inventing or discovering anything new. Just adding my voice to the on-going investigation. I am also interested in repetition and drawing so these elements feature heavily. I am interested in not only the mechanical substance of the material, but I am also interested in what it can do. 

beach sketch

Full Video Sequence

So in this work I am playing with the way that images connect in a linear direction and how sound influences what we see. There are two composers that I have borrowed music from. One is Mauro Sambo, who lives and works in Venice. I collaborated with Mauro in a work of mine called the Foundling in 2014 at the Cá Pesaro, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Venice. It was a work that like Blocking Passing first began as a video work but which was developed over a few years into a performance work. The second composer is Keegan DeWitt, has his own touring band called the Wild Cub but also composes music for feature films. We have collaborated on a number of projects. He was raised in Oregon and is now based in Los Angeles.

What I have written here is not important, you will either like the work or not, I don't care either way.