Artist research/Reference Point

A reference point for a work I’ve held onto for a long time has been ‘Fase’ by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Michèle-Anne De Mey, and Steve Reich. Within our brief of Body, Object, Space I looked to explore making a work inspired by this in collaboration with Robyn McCrae. Originally I set out to make a Super 8 movement study documenting a silhouetted performance by Robyn. I will demonstrate my plans for this in the next written entry. It is something I hope to still make but temporarily is on hold due to the time frame of this semesters’ crit project being not suitable, Super 8 is now very uncommon and to develop it incurs a long wait time. I have since explored other ideas of presenting a similar movement study using slide imagery, experimenting with printing my own slides testing inkjet images onto acetate. Initial tests looked promising but the acetate material did not dry and the images blurred and ran. See images below, I tried to dry the ink with UV light but think the material needs to be replaced. I am in the process of getting more suitable material and will try again.

I have also explored the idea of shooting slides through my camera but E6 chemistry for developing slides is now very rare and expensive, there are no labs in Glasgow which can do this except cross processing. I considered the idea of using cross processing - shooting E6 slide film and developing in C41 chemistry can yield some very interesting results but unfortunately the film itself then becomes a negative and would not be suitable for use in the slide projector. My two remaining options are to shoot negative film and investigate if it’s possible to develop this in a lab using E6 chemistry to make them positives and suitable for slide projection or to go back to the original idea of printing the images onto acetate and cutting them out to make slides on my own. The final option is to put this project on hold and come back to it with a bigger time frame available and shoot with the original intention of Super 8 moving image format and project with projector in room. See next entry.