Flex, 2017
Materials: Wood, metal, paint, polypropylene
Dimensions: Variable
Flex, 2017 (detail)
Material: Polypropylene
Flex, 2017 (detail)
Material: Polypropylene
‘Flex, 2017’ came into being after watching light and shadows dance across frosted windowpanes and while reading about grey areas. First, in Hunter Vaughan’s book ‘Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking’, which helped me understand how filmmakers work with ambiguity to challenge what it means to think [1]. Then, in Susan Sontag’s essay ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, when referencing artists who work with silence to express what lies beyond words, which creates a sense of estrangement that invites a range of interpretations [2].
‘Flex, 2017’ is an experiment with cinematic thinking. Representing an internal wall and window that have been turned into a cylindrical shape, this reworking turns the usual act of ‘looking out’ inside-out, while the circular motion of viewing the windowpanes references the shifting frames of an empty celluloid film reel.
We Are Only Partly Real (Night Cycle, Zone 1 & 2), 2025
Installation shot taken from a virtual reality exhibition ‘We Are Only Partly Real, 2025’, in conversation with the artist Steve Dutton, commissioned by Spike Island in partnership with Stephen Gray, and funded by the University of Bristol’s AHRC Impact Acceleration Award.
‘Flex, 2025′ became an object of reference to the ‘Love by Proxy Series, 2020-ongoing’, after discovering the shape on the top and bottom edges of the windowpanes was the as the Heart’s and Mind’s in the ‘Diagrammatic Drawing Series’. In this night cycle shot, ‘Flex, 2025’ channels the ‘Love by Proxy’ sequence of colours, pointing reflexively to colour as a perspective, rather than a property of a thing or an environment.
[1] Vaughan, H. Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, p5-22
[2] Sontag, S. Styles of Radical Will., London: Secker & Warburg, 1969, p1-34