Organismene, Kaibilder and
Svanejeger are all commissions for a post-millenial series of art
works, commissioned by North Tyneside Arts - placed in the
organisation's portfolio of sculptures and installations now
gracing the River Tyne.
My three short video pieces are single screen works placed in this
new permanent archive of artists who have worked on these River
Tyne commissions. I was the only video artist chosen to work on
this project. The commissions, at the time, aimed to have a similar
impact on the local cultural environment that Gormley's "Angel of
The North" did a few miles down the road.
Organismene is a complete fabrication. The piece consists of
footage of bizarre sea creatures or mutations of sea creatures that
would be more at home in "Area 51" in Nevada. I basically bought a
pot of pickled octopus from Fenwicks delicatessen counter in
Newcastle city centre and filmed them in "laboratory-style"
lighting. From there, I manipulated the images by applying digital
mirrors to one side of said pickled creature, creating a simple but
surprisingly convincing mutation. It's an old trick but a goody if
you are careful how you do it. The poster above doesn't do it
justice, that was a publicity still and not one of the new
creatures I electronically "made." At the time, I was lecturing at
Edinburgh College of Art and one of my students was Norwegian. So
the I had her translate my narrative into norwegian and she did a
great job, so much so that I had her read it too. I wanted to
highlight the links between North Tyneside and Norway which are
many. One of these links concerns fishing boundaries colliding with
Norway. So I wrote a short narrative about a Norwegian vessel in
Tyneside waters, it caught a weird number of mutations in it's
drift-net not of this area - and the whole catch was seized by HM
Customs & Excise. I filmed around 15 of these mutations and on
each one I placed a strange catalogue number to imply these were
library items, that had been examined or tampered with. A bit like
police mugshots but of alien octopus. The only remaining thing to
do was to invent a fake institute - in this case I liked the fact
that North Tyneside, an area of high unemployment and poor health
statistics - could be home to something as underground and radical
as The (North) Tyneside Institute of Astrobiology!
Kaibilder. The literal translation of this is "Quayframes" - as I
was framing the Quayside with my imagery. There's a video art
reference here also - "Keyframes" meaning a frame in a moving
sequence flagged for importance - a video editing term. This short
film is like a Mark Rothko-esque sequence of shots - the screen is
divided into nine sub frames and a dissolving painterly meditation
on the quayside takes place. I spent a long time recording
environmental noises and taking pictures of parts of the quayside
where rust and saltwater collide and make lovely blue and green
oxides. I also filled the aquamarine disinfectant coloured water in
the quayside visitor's centre. And I made montages of braille
signs, forged from stainless steel - the surfaces of which were
filthy and probably DNA ridden.
Svanejeger. Swan-hunter. In the 1980s, Swan Hunters was the name of
the most iconic shipyard in Northern England. Famous for
redundancies in Thatcher-era depression, the yard was still
completely empty when I was toured around the place. I just wanted
to make a kind of video requiem about it. A couple of weeks prior
to filming around the shipyard, I had just finished a track for a
record label in Edinburgh called Benbecula records and sent it off
in the post. I was listening to it on headphones around the
shipyard, my drones and clicks and pops fizzing in my ears as it
snowed beautifully on the huge cranes, visible from various vantage
points on the train to Newcastle. They even filmed a recent sting
for BBC1 title sequence with skateborders in Swan Hunters. It was
freezing when I was there. I went inside one of the vast sheds in
the yard and it was nearly quarter of a mile long. It was massive.
As I filmed under the harsh fluorescent lights a feather dropped
into the field of the lens. It was a white swan-like feather. I kid
you not. I made it the feature of the piece, and I used my track as
the narrative. It's not the 'cleverest' piece I've ever done, but
it's one of my favourite pieces of work.
