Joya / Mary Maclean
In my practice as an artist working with photography, I explore the structures of place and how an understanding of place is formed through its representations. The work focuses on the way in which duration might be implied within the image; the photographic works function as single, still images but through juxtapositions and sequencing they might also act as part of an extended, more ambiguous narrative.
In the series Home from Home, I positioned the camera inside individual domestic interiors using the device of the room’s window to capture the remoteness of the exterior space, so generating a slippage in time of the two spaces of distance and proximity.
A current series of images focuses on the blank surface of information boards, their depthless surface punctuated by repeated pinholes. I intend to explore the ambiguous nature of these functional forms that are rooted in everyday routines while also implying a speculative space of rock or landscape.
The series Trace explored the representation of landscape within the museum space and considered how this misplacement of space, the record of landscape, operates in relation to the original and the viewer’s memory of it.
The Residency would offer the chance to take some of the ideas I have been dealing with into a new environment which has been organized in a different way. I propose to work with moving image and still image to create different spectacles, working with scale disruptions, broken spaces and the vastness and uncontainedness of the landscape and the relationship of exterior space to the contained interior space.
I plan to develop through photography and moving image a sort of shuffling of the space that would generate points of disorientation. The camera is static in both cases but with film there is the opportunity to record subtle changes and altered situations and to imply uncertainty in the operations of the image.
I intend to explore how the two modes of image, static and moving, interact and inform each other.
I am enthused by the potentials of incorporating moving image into my practice as a way of speculating on a shifting experience of temporality.
The Joya Residency would offer me the opportunity to work over a concentrated period of time and to develop my work in relation to the stimulus of an unfamiliar space. The location of the Residency in a landscape that looks remote and unfamiliar offers the chance to intensify questions of place with which my practice is concerned.
