The future is now…
An early photogram I made in TAFE photography - I included my dad’s ink well as it was precious to me.
I often get asked how did you start on your art career? I find it hard to pinpoint an exact time. Perhaps it was when I was switched from painting to photography, perhaps it was when my grade 4 teacher liked my story about Robin Hood and the discontented squirrel, or the story in Form One (Year 7) when I wrote about adventuring in the Amazon River in a metal diving suit so I wouldn’t get eaten by piranhas! Or earlier still, in Grade 3 constructing a Parthenon out of dad’s Benson and Hedges cigarette boxes – Greece being the first place I travelled to when I went overseas.
But seriously where do you draw the line and saw before and after? Time is a construct, it’s not linear, it’s circuitous. The things I was interested in 20 years ago, still interest me but I now express them in different ways.
I used to make films for community groups and as part of my job as a drama facilitator, but gave that up when I spent so long trying to figure out Final Cut Pro which I even did a little course about.
Which brings me back to when I was 15 and shooting Super 8 film with my high school friends. One of the gang loved Hollywood, so we spent a lot of time making James Bond type movies and going to the newly opened Tullamarine airport to take film sequences of planes taking off and landing. Exciting times.
What took hours in the cutting room floor cutting, splicing and sticking the film back together with film tape, now takes a couple of digital clicks and editing is done in a flash. Do I miss the analogue days? Yes and no, because there is a sense of magic when printing in a darkroom, but it is super quick to do everything in iMovie on my phone!
I was reminded of my photography days this week in our photo challenge when we took away the colour and looked at the form and shape of objects. Colour is warm and seductive, but black and white reveals the structure hidden beneath.
I think of all the dark room artworks I made when I was in TAFE and later at uni. The ones I remember the most are the photograms and solarization experiments I did. I procured a roll of photographic paper from somewhere and decided to lay myself down on it full length and create a series of photograms. This required another person to be in the darkroom and “flash” me with light to create the image. It was lots of fun adding text and props to the images.
Afterwards I turned these into films as spoken word poems one of which was shown in the Queensland Poetry Festival and at the Surfers Paradise festival in 2010. I threw most of those photograms out but I did keep this one, the hole in the heart.
How was I to know that 20 years later, that heart would return to my images and become a major focus for artworks on paper…and so our thoughts circle back and our future comes forward to meet us.
