Preview to the Degree Show

If you've not heard about it by now, where have you been and how did you stumble across this blog? The De Montfort University Fine Art Degree Show will be opening tomorrow!

The dates are as follows,

The Preview

Friday 17th June

5.30pm - 8.30pm

The Main Show

Saturday 18th June - Thursday 23rd June

Weekends

11.00am - 4.00pm

Weekdays

10.00am - 5.00pm

Whilst there is a chance Don might not being coming, (he hasnt got back to me yet) you can be sure that I'll be there. You'd better be too, otherwise you'll be square (in some cases its actually hip to be square, not this instance however).

The younger brother

I thought I'd take the time today to write briefly about what perhaps may not immediately seem connected with my practice, but in a certain light it is indeed along a similar route.

Last year I was made aware of something of an oddity whilst I was searching through my Grandparents collection of family photos. In several of them there appeared a young lad, who I had no prior knowledge of. It came to light that he infact, was my Grandads younger brother, strangely he had disappeared about 25 years ago, and no one had heard anything from him before late last year, when he finally got back in contact with my Grandparents. 

I spent the better half today sitting, and talking with this man (and his wife), a man, who was entirely strange to my brother and I, and yet my Dad, and of course my Grandparents knew him. It was an incredibly odd sensation, and though I'm well acquainted with my Grandads sisters, to see another example of an older male figure in the family was strange. He is quite familiar in personality, tone and apparently temperament to his older brother and it was nice to have that sense of connection from the word go.

I found it a great source of personal fascination that when my practice revolves around the severance of connections in mysterious manners, that I should find myself in a situation where connections are both forged and reforged in such a way as today.

The power of the photograph

I think, in the age of digital photography, we often take for granted the curious ability to instantly capture images, and see whether its desirable or not. Facebook has transformed (to an extent) the way which we see ourselves documented in the world, people upload photos, the good, the bad and sometimes just the plain ugly.

To this end then, I think the power of the photographic image has been lessened, though in the right hands it can still provide a powerful polarising image. Eadweard Muybridge provided an invaluable source of extensive photos of animals, and humans in motion. These wonderful images go through  a complete range of actions and articulations and are a truly fascinating study.

My practice relies upon relics, the forgotten and abandoned images of our past, though this wasnt always so.

Last years work, revolved around the use of photos which had a personal connection to myself. They are, of course my Grandparents moments, their memories contained within a series of small processed sheets dating from the late 1950s, to the early part of the 1960s one example of which you can see above. I imagine in another 50 years time their delicate nature will seem absolutely absurd, as increasingly as I mentioned earlier, Facebook and its prevalence amongst my generation means we have little need for a hard copy, everything is stored digitally [More after the jump].