Two digital videos projected onto whiteboard surrounded by office notes, at forthcoming HotDesk,an exhuibition intervening in the office environment at The Old Broadcasting House, Leeds. In association with nti Leeds.
These video and photographic works are markers within an ongoing enquiry into the montage of histories that comprise urban space, the distinctions between workspaces and those designed for leisure, and the shifting functions, potentials and periods of vacancy created through temporary occupancy and re-framing of architectural structures. They act as subtly altered views, suggestions or proposals for activity.
View from Victorian Ornamental Shelter, Roundhay Park and Building 2.0 Illuminated shown at Hot Desk depict the The Victorian pavilion in the titled location looking towards Leeds centre, and the new Digital Media Campus in Sheffield. Traditionally, Victorian follies and pavilions allowed a whimsical encounter with the environment from the comfort of shelter, a contrast to practical cabin or shack-like structures or the pragmatic and dynamic intentions of much contemporary small architecture, and significant to the framing of landscape as product or object within leisure and tourism. Glass fronted environments for work in the city frame the urban landscape which their occupants are both immersed in and comfortably detached from, and many attempt a playful and stylized presence, associating enterprise and innovation with entertainment. As yet unopened, the illuminated Digital Media Campus appears active, yet strangely void and slightly kitsch.
Hotdesk/Hotdesking is a term that relates specifically to the physical yet ephemeral occupation of a work station/surface. As a new arts organization based in Leeds OutofOffice are developing a project that confronts such themes with relation to contemporary art concerns.
Evening Window 9pm(Sofanco®, re-constituted stone and stainless steel)
digital photograph on 35mm transparency
Members Show, S1 Artspace, Sheffield 2008Part of a series of video and photographic works exploring incidental, ambiguous and defunct urban features and their dormant potentials.
Route between Sheffield and Inverness Train Stations
2007
Over a twenty four hour period I traveled from Sheffield to Inverness and back again. The journey has many motivations yet was ultimately aimless; it was an exploration of travel.
The need or desire to be regularly on the move, to have a sense of multiple destinations ahead, is perhaps symptomatic of evolving relations to place in contemporary culture. Demands on time indicate specified places for work and for leisure, and allude to unknown destinations that these routines place just out of reach. A sense of elsewhere can be reached in those times away from time, in which we are restricted yet may allow ourselves to wander. These times, can occur often in the gaze out of a window and in the constantly decomposing image of outside with which we are faced during long journeys. When traveling there is a set purpose, reason, destination, but the route allows tangents of imaginary diversions to be taken. The journey is physically restricting and yet offers a freedom, non time, nowhere-ness, in which these origins and destinations can be contemplated.
The resulting work took the form of a video projected onto a window at night, though it’s role as document, composition or narrative was ambiguous