On Thursday 4th July, a smaller version of The Complexity of Touch was exhibited for one night only at FirstSite Gallery in Colchester. We had wonderful feedback and the event went very well. Thank you to the gallery for hosting us!
Exhibition at FirstSite gallery, Colchester
On 4th July, The Complexity of Touch will be exhibited at the FirstSite Gallery in Colchester. It is a one night only pop-up show for 2 hours 7-9pm. It is part of the First Thursdays creative commissions.
Link to book here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/first-thursdays-the-complexity-of-touch-tickets-928464250567?aff=odcleoeventsincollection&keep_tld=1
Please come along if you can!
Talk at Blessed Foundation in London
Polly Dalton and I will be discussing our recent collaborations (including The Complexity of Touch and Digital Forest) at a talk at The Blessed Foundation, Kennington, London on 19th June. More info to follow soon!
Photos and feedback from The Complexity of Touch at Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham
A little bit late, but here are some photos and visitor comments from the show last summer! Thank you to everyone who came, the comments showed that you liked it!
Selection of comments:
A seriously original and beautiful piece of installation art. Collaboration at its best!
A fascinating Exhibition! So elusive and thought provoking
Fantastic, immersive , involing!
Very powerful exhibition, yet so relaxing
New Project: The Complexity of Touch
The Complexity of Touch at The Bermondsey Project Space May- June 2023
I am delighted to announce that my new project, The Complexity of Touch, will be exhibited at The Bermondsey Project Space from May 23rd to June 3rd.
The Bermondsey Project Space is on Bermondsey Street in London.
The project explores the sense of touch. The installation is multi-sensory, where you are invited to touch everything. This tactile adventure is designed to engage all the senses, but particularly touch, and is based on original psychological research about touch and attention carried out earlier this year, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Professor Polly Dalton from Royal Holloway University.
A specially created soundscape by composer Nye Parry explores the tactility of sound through choreographing resonant objects in the space.
Please find more information about the project and the location below, and a link sign up for the private view next Wednesday, 24th May. I would be thrilled to see you there!
This project has been generously supported by Arts Council England
Please click link for more information:
New video work to be exhibited at Wells Cathedral this summer.
The video uses the famous and beautiful medieval astronomical clock at Wells as a starting point for a meditation on time and climate. Features an original score by Nye Parry.
The Point of Perception shown in Venice 2020
A belated post (2020 was a weird year!) about The Point of Perception in Venice. The show opened in January 2020 but of course closed in March, and reopened later in the year.
Feedback comments from Digital Forest
Feedback for the Forest was fantastic, we had some incredible reactions left in our book from enthusiastic visitors. Here is a very small selection of them…
“Completely Magical’
“Amazing, exciting, breathtaking”
“You feel transported to a new place”
“It is a thing of beauty”
“So relaxing, definitely going to come back”
“Both terrifying and relaxing”
“Incredible, spent an hour in here”
“How extraordinary, stay a while, the more you look, the more you see.”
“Loved all of it, particularly the rain effect.”
Visitor Book
Video documentation of Digital Forest Installation!
Click for a quick look at the Digital Forest Installation at its premier at Royal Holloway University in 2018.
Hopefully, the forest will move to a new venue next year.
Link to the a-n blog about new work, Digital Forest
Digital Forest initial sketches video and blog for a-n artists newsletter
This blog post about my new work in progress, Digital Forest, is also on the a-n website, as I have received a Professional Development bursary to help complete it.
“(Forests are)..sensorially far too various and immense for anything but surfaces or glimpses to be captured. They defeat view-finder, drawing paper, canvas, they cannot be framed;..” (John Fowles, The Tree, 1979)
My current project, Digital Forest, is perhaps an attempt to do the impossible, I aim to capture the essence of a forest, in all it’s sublime theatricality and sensorial diversity, and distill it into an immersive experience, which will be shown in a large gallery space at Royal Holloway University from April 2018. My research so far has proved that Fowles is, of course, right; forests resist being fully captured by view-finder or drawing paper, which is why I’m not trying to mimic a forest directly, but am filtering my rendition of a forest through a very particular lens, that of recent discoveries and theories in science and psychology. Specifically, I am using ‘Attention Restoration Theory’ (Kaplan; 2001) , which demonstrates that walking through a forested or green space reduces stress and restores attentional resources to the extent that people perform far better on tasks requiring intense concentration if they have walked through a ‘natural’ verses an urban environment. My research will explore and even test some of the possible factors that produce this positive effect on attention and create an environment, which will be an abstract installation, but that has a similar effect on someone’s attention. To help me, I am collaborating with Professor Polly Dalton, director of the Attention Lab at Royal Holloway University, and whose research centres on multi-sensory attention. We have been collaborating for many years now but this is our first big art commission. Attention restoration is linked to landscape art, because studies show that our aesthetic preference for a scene often coincides with one that restores our attention, we rate a scene higher if it restores our attention even though we don’t realise it is having this effect. Indeed some argue that restorativeness is the reason we like certain scenes. (Van Der Wulp, 2003) I find this interesting for many reasons, not least because it prompts questions about universals for aesthetic preference, which leads us to evolutionary answers. The traits in an environment that were helpful to early humans, such as those offering both prospect and refuge are still the ones which cause our attention to be restored and produce landscapes we aesthetically prefer. Urban spaces can contain these traits but it is the natural space which restores attention. Why? There has been research about the properties that cause certain environments to have a high restorative value, and I will be drawing on it in the creation of my work. ‘Complexity’ and ‘mystery’ within the scene are both significant factors in predicting stress reduction and aesthetic preference. Complexity is simply defined as ‘how much is going on in a scene/ how much there is to look at’ (Kaplan), a scene with low to intermediate levels of complexity is preferred and offers the highest restorative value. This is understandable as such a scene is likely to have enough features in it to be useful in terms of offering refuge, but not be so overwhelmed with them that it is difficult to have a clear view. Mystery means something about a scene that draws the person in and makes them want to explore further, for example, winding paths or ‘enticement’, where the person is in the dark but can see an enlightened area. Mystery evokes emotions and therefore adaptive reactions, and so evolutionarily it was a positive property for humans to encounter in an environment. Both of these factors will be fully exploited in my installation, which will be a dark space and will use use projected moving image and constructions that will hide certain areas of the space.
One of the most interesting and most important factors appears to be the geometry of the scene. Purcell, Peron and Berto (2001) speculate that natural scenes provoke high stress reducing and aesthetic responses due to an underlying fractal geometry, compared to urban scenes, which have underlying euclidean geometry. It seems it may be more specific even than that; within scenes composed of fractal geometry, it has been shown that a fractal dimension of between 1.3 and 1.5 offers the highest level of stress reduction. The fractal dimension gives a guide to the complexity of a scene as it is a ratio for the complexity of detail in a pattern as it changes with the scale at which it is measured. A fractal dimension of approximately 1.4 shows a low to intermediate level of complexity, which, as mentioned before, in a natural scene, would have offered the best chance of survival for early humans, and so today still produces the highest level of attention restoration. Intriguingly, some hypothesise that the neural mechanisms of humans are able to rapidly calculate the fractal dimension of a scene in order to quickly assess the habitability of an environment. I will be attempting to calculate the fractal dimension of the patterns in the moving images I am creating and will project. If possible, I will experiment with various levels of fractal dimension. The moving images will be abstracted from original footage filmed in forests. The abstraction is designed to bring out and exaggerate the patterning inherent in forest scenes. This patterning will be explored not only in the form but also in the sound, the movement, and the cadence. Both sound and image will be presented spatially, with sounds and moving images travelling around the space in a similar way to a real forest. Composer Prof. Nye Parry will be creating the sound for the exhibit. The installation will therefore be a real mixture of art and science, with a lot of experimentation in the studio to be done. I will follow up this initial blog with more pictures from the studio soon. Images shown here are from a short film I made of initial film sketches and ideas for the work, sound by Nye Parry.
New exhibition at The Exchange, Twickenham from Monday 23rd October
Film still prints from the 'Playing the Bridge' project will be exhibited in a brand new venue in Twickenham from 23rd October 2017.
The Exchange, opposite Twickenham station will exhibit ten large prints of stills from the videos that were projected inside Scale Lane Bridge in Hull. They are collaged construction photos of the fabrication of the bridge. Exhibition runs until the end of December 2017.
'Forests In Your Field' Symposium was fun and fascinating
A small symposium held at Royal Holloway University on 11th September was a great way to gather the knowledge about forests of many different academics, all from their own perspective.
New! Prints from Playing the Bridge available to buy!
Visit the Playing the Bridge prints gallery page to see the prints available.
New documentation for Playing The Bridge
Click here to find a new video with documentation of the community gamelan performance, the devised performance with sounds from the bridge (choregraphed by Nye Parry) and the installation, which were all features of the Playing the Bridge project.
New exhibition at Scale Lane Bridge, Hull for HUll 2017 City of Culture.
Supported by Hull 2017 City of Culture.
My brand new installation, in collaboration with Nye Parry is at Scale Lane Bridge until the end of April.
Click here for photos: https://we.tl/TTeqJv9YnJ
Click here for video: https://vimeo.com/211730905
Interview with POSTmatter magazine
Article and interview about my work on POSTmatter magazine!
http://postmatter.com/#/currents/darkness-and-light?platform=hootsuite
Point of Perception in Kuala Lumpar!
the Illusion Tour featuring The Point of Perception continues in Malaysia. It will be at Petrosains in Kuala Lumpar from 4th Sept 2015 to 10 Jan 2016. This is the first time it has been shown in Asia.
Link to Petrosains: http://www.petrosains.com.my/programmes/illusion/
Talk at Kingsgate Workshops, NW6 on Saturday 25th July
I will be taking part in a symposium on Art and Science at the Kingsgate Workshops in West Hampstead, NW6 2JG, London on Saturday 25th July.
I will give a brief overview of my work and join in the discussion panel on Body , Vision and New Technology. The day will focus specifically on multi-sensory interactions. The event is supported by Camden Arts Centre.
The event is free, all welcome. Starts at 10am, my panel commences at 3pm.
Details and address at: http://thelabproject.tumblr.com/step1
Closing Party for 'Sculpting Motion' at Gerald Moore Gallery
Saturday 28th is the last day of the exhibition, please come and celebrate with us between midday and 4pm. Last chance to see the installations!
Go to https://vimeo.com/120250398 to see a taster of the show.