CURRENT PROJECTS
’s/Wake, Artist’s book
A man and a woman, long married, are locked down for most of an entire year alongside, but socially distanced from, the rest of the UK population. As the couple bicker and blunder through the days – as if in some Beckettian nightmare – the woman keeps a diary. In a series of fragmentary notations made in the app Evernote, the diary records her and also not her; not only how the many, many individuals living under the same conditions felt, but how these thoughts were expressed: the shared terminology, the shared assumptions. Not the ego-led ‘insipid moral musings’, loathed by Roland Barthes, that prioritise an interior ‘self’, but rather an entanglement of voices, a record of social mores: what was said, how it was said, who was doing the saying.
This is the second ‘diary project’ I have worked on; a diary that incorporates news reports, receipts, advertisements and flyers, interwoven with fragments of speech overheard on the radio, at the bus stop, in the cafes – all the ‘litter’ from the external world. Images of the first, de Umbris Idæarum [on the Shadow Cast by our Thoughts], which is a record of the year 2011, can be seen HERE.
’s/Wake, recorded over 2021, consists of 5,252 notations – a total of 686,288 words – and is currently being edited down (although not by very much). I hope to complete the work, which will take the form of a single, large book – or ‘involuntary novel’ – by early 2026. I have written about it HERE.
An essay by the art historian Margaret Iversen, which discusses this work alongside that of photographer and film maker Moyra Davey, can be found HERE.
STREAM
I started using Instagram at the end of 2019, less than six months before the UK’s first period of Lockdown. I was intending to document my then-recent commission to make new Jacquard tapestries for the library and study centre at St John’s College, Oxford. Instead, because everything had ground to a halt, I began to consider Instagram as a medium. The various constraints – 2,200 characters for the caption, the square format, the way video would loop endlessly but was limited to one minute – appealed to me. Most of these constraints have now gone. However, throughout 2024, I began posting short videos on Stories: views over rooftops, or from the bus; a lone cyclist at night. I am currently editing the material – an entire year's worth – to make Stream, an ‘involuntary’ film that, from my current estimate, will be about 18 hours long.
TRAIN FILM
At the start of 2023, I found myself restless, eager to travel. Then I found myself unable to stop. Addicted to train timetables, I planned each journey with military precision. Yet each time I set off – a wrench. I am aware that this sense of dislocation (of not belonging) is related to my particular (working class) background, an identity usually suppressed in academia or the art world – especially, it seems to me, amongst my generation.
Recently, however, I have found myself wanting to speak about this – or, at least, to speak in this – my ‘mother tongue’, or darling tongue, as John Berger puts it. In Russian it is rodnoy-yazik, which means “nearest” or “dearest tongue”. At a pinch one could call it “darling tongue”. Mother tongue is one’s first language, first heard as an infant.
I kept travelling, and filming, until late 2024. I am now editing this material together. I am also working on a written text that will be spoken over this film – or appear as subtitles, if I decide to keep the original sound (which I like for its Cagean unpredictability). Either way, I hope to convey something of the rebellious melodiousness, the sheer musicality, of an accent from the city of Birmingham.
On the choice of subject matter: only when you see it through the lens, as film (and not when you experience it in real life), do you notice the relation of images shot from a train to the flicker and blind spot of early cinema, house of dreams.
EXTRACT HERE
