Four portraits of four teenagers – made with the collaboration of the Durham Light Infantry museum and using uniforms from their collection.
They sit looking out into their uncertain futures with mesmerised expressions. The uniforms are from a random selection of history and also exist in an odd 'other world', both suggesting historical context whilst hinting at current fashion.
The backdrops are contemporary and also imply another less obvious way of reading the picture. They refer to painting in that they are 'considered' and have a feeling of having been 'worked at'. They are dramatic in lighting, but they are also very much of the here and now, and the theatre they represent is one that questions what it is to make a 'representation'.
These are now framed in lovely, heavy black frames with a fillet pushing them back off the glass giving them extra depth. I plan to release a small framed edition of prints so please get in touch if you are interested in acquisition.
Gestalt is quite an involved installation project which I began a few years ago. It has expanded and now includes an ongoing element called:
5131 Bomb Disposal
Andrew Dodds is a member of the RAF bomb disposal team. I interviewed him before his tour of duty in Iraq and then afterwards. I was interested in all the things that go unsaid in the usual reporting of such subjects. I wondered more about what it was to 'imagine' being there versus the reality of having been there afterwards.
As I have been exploring in my work for some time, the linear nature of experience is less important to me than the duality of time experienced through it's accumulated reporting. I am fascinated by the fact that time is all we have to record happenings and emotions and yet it is an intangible - forever running away from us.
This takes the form of a dual projected video installation - with 'before' and 'after' meeting somewhere in the middle.
UPDATE
I am very pleased to have been offered a showing date in the main gallery at the DLI Museum and Durham Art Gallery for summer 2010 to preview this piece in its entirety and hope to add other venues afterwards. Initial production was supported by the Arts Council.
Specials Laboratories commissioned me to make a video installation sited in their head office. It takes the form of a video tower similar to that originally envisaged for Gestalt. The client wanted a piece that reflected their own environment. They made no stipulations as to content and I was allowed total freedom of access and concept.
'controller' video that plays audio also. In the Specials context this enables them to create permutations of what is shown on the four monitors on any particular day.
use it as a vehicle for furthering my exploration and expansion of what it is to document 'time' - and the impossibility/contradictions of all that such a concept presents. I concentrated on particular details of activity, stretching or emphasising. 
The controller video is 15mins long - the clip here gives a flavour of my approach. Sequences 'suggested' captions and refer backwards and forwards in time, making unexpected combinations. The process of making a 'Special' (in the pharmaceutical sense) is very much one of taking disparate elements and making one off potions... in this way I was hoping to make a conceptual link in a purely structural way.
Made with grant assistance from the Arts Council this piece takes the form of four large format prints which are intended to face each other (see right) with a central video tower. Although the layout in my visual is an 'ideal' scenario, I anticipate other spaces could dictate a different orientation.
