Art Installations
With a background in computer animation but a passion for the hand-made, my work spans digital and traditional techniques, from papercutting to video. I delight in exploring new creative avenues, which informs my live visual, graphic design and facilitator work.
Much of my installation work explores writing. It’s a process that I have personally battled with, often finding it hard to make the leap from ideas to written words. The technique I found most helpful was freewriting; writing from stream-of-consciousness without pausing or editing. It allows a momentum and flow to develop, leading to new insights and clarity. I find that freewriting most closely matches the way we actually think; respecting the order that words naturally tumble out of our minds.
How do we translate ideas into words? Experiments with projection, installation and collaborative performance illuminate hidden facets of the writing journey.
Click on an image below to view its slide show
The Open Book
February 2015 - Jewish Book Week, Kings Place
September 2015 - Digital Design Weekend, V&A
Books are revelations; the thoughts and ideas of their authors unfolding with every page. At the same time they are opaque – they don’t show us the process behind their formation; the false starts, the rough drafts, the doubts and ruminations of the author.
This piece, originally commissioned for Jewish Book Week 2015, is about the creation of an alternative book. It is written in public, over just a few days, by a team of volunteers and visitors, mostly strangers to each other. Each participant is asked to write two pages of freewriting. There is no editing. The order of pages is not important. This book is about its own creation, a process that is played and replayed in the video projections, formed from recordings of the writing as it happens.
The Live Writing Stream
Video installation with live writing performances
May-June 2014
Taking 5-minute turns to be "writers in residence", participants inscribed their thoughts about writing onto a single scroll of paper. Digital projection superimposed their live writing into the performance space, combining it with the endlessly rolling text of the scroll in the background.
Words stream from hand to page, from private thoughts to public projection. The rolls of paper allude to hand-written ancient scrolls and the typewritten hundred-foot roll on which Jack Kerouac wrote “On the Road”, known for its stream-of-consciousness style.
Live writers: Polena Chandra Barbagallo, Alberto Duman, Jennifer Kallin, Ivor Kallin, Loraine Leeson, Maggie Pettigrew, Sargam Picker, Raphael Prais, Matt Randal, Antonia Reed, Simon Rosenberg, Tansy Spinks, Emyr Tomos, Pete Wallace.
Assistant director: Emma Bondor
The Live Writing Circle
February 2014
A live experiment featuring a group of writers creating pages of stream-of-consciousness text. Live video feed of their writing process was projected onto large translucent screens, transforming the private act of freewriting into a public spectacle.
Collaborating writers: Simeon Avery, Deborah Brooks, Kotryna Garanašvili, Jenny McBain, Sargam Picker and Matthew Randle
Write Through
March 2014
This installation was created for the atmospheric arch of Beaconsfield gallery. Projected live-written words drift across a concrete floor, into translucent fabric and through cut-out frames. The materials and motion play on metaphors of the writing process.
In collaboration with
Writers: Simeon Avery and Caroline Cardus
Designers: Mamta Gurung, Sruthi Nambiar and Ja Hkawn Kumje
Imaginaludica
February 2013
A collaboration with four contemporary dancers on a series of improvised vignettes. I used live feed to create video feedback loops; overlaying the live motion of the figures with recordings of their earlier movements. This gave me the freedom to re-choreograph the dancers in real time and allowed them to dance with visual echoes of themselves. It was a way of breaking out of the linearity of time as witnessed by the audience.
Dancers: Charly Abbots, Catherine Barr, Priyanka Chaman, Lewis Jenkins
Spirituality in Motion
November 2012
3FF Urban Dialogues Award
An interfaith collaboration with flmmaker Sedi Ghadiri and painter Marta Rocamora which culminated in an exhibition at Red Gallery.
When the three of us first met, we were intrigued by the similarity of movement rituals among our different belief systems. We were also interested in noting the connections between these motions and everyday human habits. The purpose of our exhibition is to shine the spotlight on these rituals, to see how these movements help us establish a spiritual connection within us, beyond us and with others.
Remnants
August 2010
A common mantra is: “live in the present moment”. But as much as we try, moments from our past surface uninvited into our minds, to interrupt our experience of the present. These memories can be so startling and obscure that they throw us off track. Or they can be tantalising – fleeting glimmers that entice us back in time, with promises of nostalgic warmth.
This moment, right now, will almost certainly be forgotten to you in a matter of hours, days or weeks. For me, fear of loss drives me to try and preserve my thoughts and memories through journaling. I’ve hoarded decades of diary writings like precious scraps of evidence or puzzle pieces. In this artwork, those memories are presented in bottles, as a glass curtain, giving the choice to look into these moments or to look past them. It’s an echo of our constant dance between past and present.
The Tower of Psychobabble
April 2009
Inspired by the biblical “Tower of Babel” story, this piece is a critique of self-help literature and its aphorisms.
I've used a combination of origami architecture and papercutting techniques to build this piece. The piece originated from a single sheet of card and was formed into a three-dimensional word-filled tower by the laborious process of cutting parts away. It's about creating something out of nothing. At first glance it’s a 3D structure, but you soon realise how minimal and tenuous its foundations are.
