A little while back Cupola Gallery, in Sheffield, announced one of their regular yearly Open Call exhibitions, around the theme of Perception. Neither of us had any work prepared which really fit in with the theme, and it was a tight deadline to hit as well. Amy sensibly decided to stay away from it rather than rush shooting or making something new.
Lacking that common sense, I (Ben) on the other hand decided to try something new... After looking at various dictionary definitions of "Perception" I decided I liked the idea of a project about recording, interpreting and looking at the world around us, but with an unusual twist.
For the basis of this project, a trip back in time to an earlier one, from way back in the early 2000's...
The Background
Back at Foundation Year (a slightly-terrifying 14+ years ago), my Final Major Project was a sarcastic swipe at Health and Safety Culture, which was a way of getting back at the fact that the project before had been slightly ruined by not being allowed to do some artwork outdoors in a public place for the vague-catch-all term of Health and Safety.
So the FMP was the production of a catalogue of equipment, studios, buildings, and clothing to allow artists to safely interact with the outside world. It was based very heavily on some very dry catalogues with moustachioed pot-bellied middle-aged men modelling gas masks, haz-suits and work helmets, all with vaguely fetishistic overtones, and involved a lot of me and some friends dressing up in whatever vaguely safety gear I could find around college.
For other equipment I built some scale models, actually one of the first big miniatures builds for an art project I ever did, and some crude photomontages were done using the immensely basic version of Photoshop we had at the time. Above is one of the few shots I still have from the project, with the Artist Field Studio inserted into a pic I shot (on a very early digital compact) of Snowdonia, looking towards either Llanberis or Beddgelert I think, its hard to tell from such a grainy image a decade and a half later...
The Artist Field Studio cropped up again in the Britannia Model Village, as seen in the background of a test composition for one of the shots. The 2009 additional shots for the Birmingham Exhibition of the Model Village featured the concept of Artist Health and Safety rather more prominently, as a Government-sponsored art programme for recording the slightly chaotic alternate-reality of Britannia from the wider model village project.
The Idea/Backstory- "Observe to Preserve"
The idea I had for this open call would be a call-back to both projects. It would still be set in the alternate reality version of the UK, Britannia (which has been the setting of numerous projects like the Steampunk "Century Survey", the Model Village, and a few others dotted around) and in terms of the alternate timeline I wrote-up takes place about 2050.
I've been reading rather a lot of John Wyndham recently- "Day of the Triffids", and "The Kraken Wakes" being two which had a leaning on the new project, and watched the film of "The Girl With All The Gifts". I was taken with the idea of a world where some apocalypse has happened, and nature is taking back over again.
I didn't want a violent post-apocalypse with zombies and so on for the project, but liked the idea that the worst has happened (I decided not to allude to what specifically caused the calamity), and what's left of society is heading peacefully towards the end. The Government of Britannia has commissioned some sort of official programme, dubbed "Observe to Preserve" which is recording the world around them for posterity. It was somewhat inspired by a scene in the novel "On The Beach" by Nevil Shute, where one of the characters, with humanity facing extinction, mentions that the Government of Australia has been preserving pages from encyclopedias and other books and artworks sealed in glass in a tomb high up in the mountains, so that 'whoever comes next' after radiation has wiped out existing life, will see some of our achievements).
The post-apocalyptic nature of the time would be hinted at, with odd ruined buildings, dead plants and so on very much in the background, and it would be mostly shot with miniatures- the tight deadline of the open call meant there wasn't time to recruit a model, get costumes, or do location shoots with real people. So in this sense it would be a bit of a compromise, but its also been a long time since I've done a shoot with miniatures like this, and was looking forward to the challenge...
The Models
Given how several house moves, and the lack of storage space means most of my miniatures get binned or recycled into other projects, the artist field studio has been a remarkable survivor. It was built to roughly 1/32nd scale and thus decided what the rest of the project would be built to. It was looking a tad ropey though, after eight years in a box in the loft, and needed some significant rebuilding...
Also needed were some home-made signage to link in with the Britannia theme of the Model Village- not too easy, as the original hard drive with all the pre-designed signs and logos is kaput, meaning I had to start from scratch.
I knew I needed a human figure for some of the shots, and happily found this bomb-disposal technician war gaming miniature on eBay. Very detailed, and a decent 'hero' miniature for the shoot.
Finally, a heavy upgrade of the concept of the Mobile Field Studio, cobbled together from all sorts of odds and ends of model kits and food containers.
Shortly I'll be launching the Model Making Blog, and there will be a bigger feature on all this stuff on there, in greater detail...
The First Shoot- Haworth
So with only two days to get the shoot done in order to get the pics off to the Gallery, literally 48 hours to shoot and edit to the deadline, I managed to pick the one day with stable-looking weather, the two eldest Foster Childs as assistants and my father-in-law as driver (as I didn't have access to the car that day) and headed up to Haworth. Not ideal shooting conditions in any sense with two kids to control and none of my own transport, on a day with weird lighting, but then the fun of working to a deadline eh...
Haworth was chosen simply because it was close and had a ruined building in a rural setting- this nice old farmhouse which would make a lovely restored home, or would have done about ten years ago before it got so decrepit it would now need demolishing and rebuilding.
A handy stone wall covered in moss gave a spot for shooting... but the scaling doesn't quite work out, as the house is still far too close.
The Worth Valley Railway was running too that day, so being as I am Me, and like taking train pictures, a brief digression of the W&M Railbus on the early morning service trains whilst I was shooting the various pics.
A better spot (and praise be, the sunshine) with the house more in scale behind.
A slightly different angle.
An overgrown tree stump on the path back up allowed this shot, though scaling was still an issue given the long grass in the foreground. Probably there were some better locations here I could have used, but time was pressing on, and it is chaos trying to shoot pics with two squabbling kids slithering around in the mud behind you demanding attention.
The Second Shoot, later that morning above Oxenhope
The second part of the shoot was Up On t'Moors, above nearby Oxenhope. Up here there are loads of wind turbines, a quarry, and a road which I would not dare go up in our awful car, but which my father-in-law's Landy handled with ease.
The only problem was the clouds were closing in...
...and I managed a couple of interesting shots with the miniature of the suited figure, before...
...the clouds closed in and obscured the turbines. Bugger.
Still, I managed a few nice shots of the Field Studio in the gloom and mist.
The weather was really closing in now, so I beat a hasty retreat to the Landy where everyone else had sensibly stayed in the warm. Card models don't handle wet weather well.
There was no time for the planned extra shots in Keighley and Thackley which would have given a more urban feel to the photos, as the weather stayed awful for the next day. So I sent off a selection of these images, with no great hope of hitting the rather more fine-art orientated tastes the gallery has at the moment, and planned a second shoot in urban locations in the West Midlands the weekend after submission, so I would have a larger selection of shots to choose from in the unlikely event of being picked... More on that (spoiler alert) disaster-filled nightmare of a shoot in the next blog.
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