Final artist statement
Stephen Jackson: Artist statement 14/06/06
From growing up in Northern Ireland, I have always been interested in and acutely aware of political and personal landscape and territory, and of the fixed, polarised positions people tend to publicly adopt within areas of conflict. I am interested in how people position themselves and cope, both within geographical areas affected by conflict, and within their own emotional landscapes.
In my youth, BBC Northern Ireland and Ulster Television news were of great importance and never missed in our house. Looking back it seems that these news reports were as much a ritual as our evening family meals. They kept my parents, and by default me, up to date with the daily violence and political struggle within our small country, becoming a soundtrack to my childhood. As passive witnesses, their images strongly informed our collective memory.
Video/sound work
In Dance, a 3 screen video and sound installation, I decided to work directly with footage that had been broadcast in Northern Ireland over the course of the troubles. Within the central footage, I have removed actions from their original context, extracting human figures from their surroundings and re-animating them within more neutral digital spaces. This releases figures from specific times and spaces to perform a kind of melancholic dance. The extracted figures have been thrown out of focus just enough to avoid categorization by the viewer, suggesting a more universal experience of people caught up within conflict and changing territories, touching on ideas of dislocation, loss, willpower, strength and shared experience. I want these figures to convey a sense of searching for understanding or meaning. I also think of this blurring as symbolising a beginning of forgetting, of fading memory. I want to consider this idea of loss of memory as new beginning, specifically in relation to the notion put forward by Susan Sontag In her book “Regarding The Pain Of Others”. Sontag wrote:
“The belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited”.
The soundtrack to Dance is also partly constructed from archived material as well as newly recorded material (mainly voice and often abstracted) and computer generated, abstract soundscapes. The soundtrack acts as a kind of lens, with an ebb and flow of focus. Adding focus at points, hinting at possible narratives, then receding back towards a more abstract state, drifting, giving the viewer only brief lucid moments. This work has a sense of time slowing - an opening up of space, of being meditative, melancholic. I have been very inspired in the past by the sense of time and space that exists within the video works of Bill Viola and in films by Andre Tarkovsky.
Photographic work
The series of prints entitled 100m are semi abstract photographic squares. Each square is made up of 100 x 1cm x 100cm linear photographic images, laid in thin strips beside one another. Each discrete 1cm x 100cm section is a direct digital photograph of a 1m section of Northern Irish/Irish border, each work being a representation of a continuous 100m line of that border. These composite photographs are captured at 1:1 scale, reminiscent of the Boyle Family’s ongoing series of works entitled Journey to the Surface of the Earth, in which they democratically select a location by throwing darts at a map, then represent it as accurately as possible and on the same scale. When viewed from a distance my 100m works appear as abstract squares. As you approach the fact that they are made up of strips of images becomes more apparent, and when viewed up close it is possible to see the detail of the photographed landscape. They refer to scanning lines, of sampling and surveying landscapes, and to surveillance. I have chosen to present them in a group, as I think their richness emerges through multiples.
From growing up in Northern Ireland, I have always been interested in and acutely aware of political and personal landscape and territory, and of the fixed, polarised positions people tend to publicly adopt within areas of conflict. I am interested in how people position themselves and cope, both within geographical areas affected by conflict, and within their own emotional landscapes.
In my youth, BBC Northern Ireland and Ulster Television news were of great importance and never missed in our house. Looking back it seems that these news reports were as much a ritual as our evening family meals. They kept my parents, and by default me, up to date with the daily violence and political struggle within our small country, becoming a soundtrack to my childhood. As passive witnesses, their images strongly informed our collective memory.
Video/sound work
In Dance, a 3 screen video and sound installation, I decided to work directly with footage that had been broadcast in Northern Ireland over the course of the troubles. Within the central footage, I have removed actions from their original context, extracting human figures from their surroundings and re-animating them within more neutral digital spaces. This releases figures from specific times and spaces to perform a kind of melancholic dance. The extracted figures have been thrown out of focus just enough to avoid categorization by the viewer, suggesting a more universal experience of people caught up within conflict and changing territories, touching on ideas of dislocation, loss, willpower, strength and shared experience. I want these figures to convey a sense of searching for understanding or meaning. I also think of this blurring as symbolising a beginning of forgetting, of fading memory. I want to consider this idea of loss of memory as new beginning, specifically in relation to the notion put forward by Susan Sontag In her book “Regarding The Pain Of Others”. Sontag wrote:
“The belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited”.
The soundtrack to Dance is also partly constructed from archived material as well as newly recorded material (mainly voice and often abstracted) and computer generated, abstract soundscapes. The soundtrack acts as a kind of lens, with an ebb and flow of focus. Adding focus at points, hinting at possible narratives, then receding back towards a more abstract state, drifting, giving the viewer only brief lucid moments. This work has a sense of time slowing - an opening up of space, of being meditative, melancholic. I have been very inspired in the past by the sense of time and space that exists within the video works of Bill Viola and in films by Andre Tarkovsky.
Photographic work
The series of prints entitled 100m are semi abstract photographic squares. Each square is made up of 100 x 1cm x 100cm linear photographic images, laid in thin strips beside one another. Each discrete 1cm x 100cm section is a direct digital photograph of a 1m section of Northern Irish/Irish border, each work being a representation of a continuous 100m line of that border. These composite photographs are captured at 1:1 scale, reminiscent of the Boyle Family’s ongoing series of works entitled Journey to the Surface of the Earth, in which they democratically select a location by throwing darts at a map, then represent it as accurately as possible and on the same scale. When viewed from a distance my 100m works appear as abstract squares. As you approach the fact that they are made up of strips of images becomes more apparent, and when viewed up close it is possible to see the detail of the photographed landscape. They refer to scanning lines, of sampling and surveying landscapes, and to surveillance. I have chosen to present them in a group, as I think their richness emerges through multiples.
posted by Phsteve at 5:05 PM
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