Since I am now going to submit some work I am doing in conjunction with a group called Pic London, or at least part of it for BOW 1.2, I need to record development and research in more detail than I have done to date.
I will be submitting work that is part of a group show titled A rumour reached the village. The project is the result of a collaborative process which took place over the summer and continues still, and is one for four groups showing work under the Pic London After School Collective strategies name at Lewisham Art House in October.
There are roughly six people in each group. Ours includes Michaela Lahat, Rowan Lear, Eva Louisa Jonas, Joshua Phillips, Christel Pilkaer Thomsen and me.
Why I submitted my work to Pic London in the first place
Before submitting for DI&C assessment I shared a newspaper element, which I eventually sent to the OCA, with OCA friends and a couple of external people for feedback. Sometimes when I share my work with people there are embarrassed silences as people don’t know what to do, where to look, or what to say. This can make it quite hard to feel OK with the work or get the sort of constructive feedback I am after. I have discussed this before and I am aware that quite often my work is hard to make sense of especially when it’s still in the early stages of being developed. Although I had received some useful feedback from my cohort about the way the paper might be construed by assessors (and a warning that I must stress the films were the main element in the submission while the paper a supporting document) I was searching for a conversation about what worked and what didn’t come across as I hoped. A good friend who is a photographer said she did not feel qualified to give me the sort of feedback that would be helpful but she felt the work was strong and urged me to submit it a call out by Pic London. (My fifteen-year-old son was in fact extremely helpful in the end.)
As an aside, my friend and I have spoken several times about where my work is heading and I have said I feel like the usual photography competitions are just not suitable places for me. And not do I want to be limited to straight photographs. I am in a constant state of flux at the moment about where my energies should be directed and what sort of work I should spending my time on. I am confused in my head and split, but not split in a clear and defined way. More a fragmented mess of a crisis way. This is probably apparent in the choices and mis-choices I am making with each discipline and how I choose to express it; commercial work photography and this other work I do for which I don’t yet have a name. I am also beginning to wonder if the commercial photography is the same as the non-commercial photography, so long as it is just photography; and the other unnamed stuff I do is not photography at all although at times it may contain images. That might sound terribly confusing – and if it does, that’s an accurate reflection of where I am.
For Pic London, I submitted the final DI&C project, Origin of the Common-Place and Assignment 2 – Polar Interia along with the newspaper and was thrilled when it was accepted. However, having submitted that moving image work – having so little experience in all of this – I felt that some form of video work in the same vein would be what was expected of me. Perhaps I was wrong – I am still figuring this all out.
Workshops
I actually had no idea what the resulting work would be. It took me a while to be really clear that whatever we had submitted wasn’t being shown but some new collaborative project which would emerge out of the workshops.
We were put into groups – these were listed in the application where we had to state a preference. I went for Hal Silver who I had never heard about but that group seemed to suggest performance would be involved which sounded right for me and I was glad to be assigned to the group I wanted.
Hal Silver was made up from a group of RA photography students who wanted to explore practices beyond their narrowly photo-focused studies. I think they got together in 2010. The workshop leaders, Una Hamilton Helle, and Joshua Bilton have pages about Hal Silver on their websites but it was quite hard to pin down who or what Hal Silver was online prior to meeting them. I quite liked this slightly incognito and enigmatic air that Hal Silver projected when I tried to look him/her/it up. We were told he/she/it might not even turn up at all! So a form of performance seemed to begin before we even met or started playing together. (I do now wonder if the original members had hidden the relevant pages from their websites as none of us were able to find out much about Hal Silver by doing searches prior to the workshops beginning.)
Pic London’s description of Hal Silver’s plans:
The workshops will be experimental in nature and the focus of each session will be on collective forms of making, improvisation and group dynamics. This could take the form of games, role-play, unskilled mask and costume making, photography, video and sound recording. These process-led activities can be gathered into a final exhibition display, the form of which will be established throughout the workshop sessions. (2019)
We were given three talks from each of the leaders/groups over a period of several weeks on Saturday mornings, which were followed by workshops where the seeds of some ideas were introduced to us.
Find out more about each of the workshop leaders and focus on Pic London’s website.
As the work has not yet opened and is still in progress, I will either need to wait to publish any further information or publish privately (more likely the latter as I need to ensure there is enough material available for Ruth/assessors to see my process.)
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