Filtering by Tag: photography

Speaking of ambivalent archiving

Added on July 18, 2022 by Kira O'Reilly.

Speaking of ambivalent archiving, what does or does not pique interest when posting the occasional archival item on social media is entirely unpredictable and full of surprise, as is the case with this photograph.

In this version, the trick can clearly be seen, the crude paper cut out balanced on the escheveria plant, the Instagram version looks more convincing. The charm, for myself at least, partly lies in the absence of a digital seamlessness and more in the toying of a clunky cutting, orienting, placement and scale. It would be perhaps an idea to do more.

The image was a playful moment, made in the wake of working with artist and book designer David Caines, who suggested working with professional and personal archival material through collage. During a visit to Helsinki in 2017, he scanned and printed items following discussions, which I cut out. He assembled some beautiful black and white ones for the book - which continue to be my favourite material in it. Following his visit, I came across this one, which was cut out from a photograph of my work Untitled (syncopations for more bodies) The succulent was a gift for my 50th birthday from the six students who formed the one and sadly only cohort for the pilot masters programme, Masters in ecology and contemporary performance (MAECP) at University of the Arts, Helsinki.

Whenever I see this image, I am reminded of work in the mid to late ‘90s by Eve Dent , at the time she worked with photography and performance and was inspired - if I remember correctly, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s proto-feminist novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, she created a wall paper print work in which she had embedded tiny figures of herself. I know it was a book that was very relevant to me at the time, as I explored and worked with the concept of the hysteric as a performative bodily strategy of resistance. I made performances, video works, drawings and animation exploring this idea of the hysteria as a proto-feminist figuration - and indeed one of ambiguity. Speaking of hysteria, this recent e-flux article, Hysteria as Scenography by Marie de Testa covers some of the references and thinking that was informing my thinking and works in the late ‘90s. Looking at the documentation now, there appears to be some of those preoccupations still at play in some of the performed contortions of Untitled (syncopations for more bodies)
albeit that was not the intention at the time, the work did fold into it’s metabolising processes, collaging of other references elements from cinema and performances which I will write about in another post.

Perhaps more cut outs, cut outs and collaged makings will emerge from this small fragment. The disparate act of recombining discreet elements continues to be a characteristic and ploy in my writing - and a preoccupation in how I approach visual works - with a nod to the works of a great many of the female surrealists. In the comments on the Instagram post artist Traci Kelly generously noting: It's great when you stumble across a previous work that reactivates thinking . . . ‘

Notes on a photograph

Added on October 11, 2019 by Kira O'Reilly.

In the airy galleries of the Foundation Beyeler in Basel a roomy white sofa sits in front of a large canvas of one of Monet's water lily scenes. The painting is found within a large expanse of oils that appear and lead you into the living time and space of both its execution and the actuality of the event of Monet's perception of the lily pond. Its materiality a movement of light, ones own apparatus of sight and his intra-action within the field of vision, as in visionary, sambhogakaya or long ku - energy, light and sound.

Speaking with Ravens is a serious of paintings made by Ngak'chang Rinpoche when a student at Bristol Art College. The surrealist figuration of woman and bird appear to dissolve and emerge within the deeply layered and textured ground. The paintings themselves were long lost, but colour transparencies later found. The slides damaged by the decay of time, were subsequently reworked by Ngak'chang Rinpoche using his skills in Photoshop, and newly realised as digital paintings, the beauty of their decay worked into the depths of the paintings.

The toweling playsuit was pale candy stripped and zipped. I was holding a hose in the yard, the area at the back of the house where there stood a long low turf shed, a collapsing greenhouse full of wonder and a stables floored with cobbled stables. Often the two donkeys would be brought down from the hill filed or up from the slope. Riding and grooming them was a favourite pleasure of those summers. Alanna, the grey one, Ashling, her daughter the brown one. Who, as a young spindly donkey charged with great daring the drying sheets hung out on the washing lines, she was like a daft, fluffy bull. Herself and Alanna had a great ploy to rid us off their backs, making a short charge, then a sudden stop, putting the head down we'd move inevitably forwards with the force of it sliding down the furry necks and over the long ears to the ground. Undignified and fun. With a briefing from Thelwell's potty equine illustrations.The light felt saddles weren't much good, and the light bridles pretty lame.

The was a bright red toy trailer that could be pulled, often with a small brother or a pink teddy bear in it. There were not alot of toys, but I don't recollect any lack. There was so much to do, discover and potter with. Dark, dank outhouses full of cobwebs and old, rusty treasures, snails and spiders, beetles and birds, cats and crows, dogs, donkeys, horses, blue tits, great tits, robins, black birds and owls, table tennis and old, black bicycles.

Liz was utterly glamorous, gorgeous and comely in her Kensington up to the minute fashion. A tan suede skirt with a tassel stopped well before the knees, clinging turtle necks, pendant jewelry, large bouffant waves, holding an infant, Shane.