Accumulation.
North East Photography Network (NEPN) commission. The project involved facilitating two participatory workshops creating darkroom photograms from plastic material collected by participants from a coastal site in Roker, Sunderland.
The darkroom prints made during the workshops were scanned and printed onto digital film. The printed film formed a temporary installation on the coast in the site where the pastic detritus was collected.
www.northeastphoto.net/project/graham-patterson-accumulation/
Diaphanous
The flowing polythene mirrors the tidal space whose vista is diffused behind the material. Theodor Schwenk's, 1965 book Sensitive Chaos - 'Flowing Forms in Air and Water', describes “the flow of water as curvilinear, gliding, meandering, oscillating,rhythmically ebbing and flowing, going forth and returning”
Materiality
Arts Council funded group exhibition on Holy Island, featuring the work of six North-East based artists. As curator of the project I worked with organisations such as Natural England and English Heritage to ensure permission was granted to the artists proposed use of materials at their chosen sites.
Dr. Mike Collier contributed an essay for the project 'One island, two names … that appeared in the fold out risograph guidemap. Five hundred copies were printed, half of which were distributed to arts venues in the North-East, the remainder were placed in leaflet dispensers close to the works. A walk was arranged on the opening day of the exhibition. The artists discussed their work on site and the ways in which the geographical and historical significance of the Island manifested itself in the works they exhibited.
I commissioned a film crew in order to document the project. The film features the artists installing their works synced to interviews detailing their practice
terra incognita
Sheets of acetate formerly used in a commercial printers for litho book layouts, cable tied to the base of plastic fish boxes and buoys attached via trawler cable entwined and wedged between rocks in a tidal inlet where the incoming tide on stormy day smashes into jagged rocks.
The marks on the acetate record the intangible interaction between the material and the aforementioned abrasive coastal landscape. The sheets of acetate were retrieved and the scratched marks ingrained with black intaglio printing ink. These were presented in exhibition form attached to fishing line and offset from the surface of a table or wall in direct sunlight to enable the scratches to cast elongated shadows.
Panorama
Pinhole camera wedged in the rocks attached to a heavy rubber bollard to help withstand the onslaught of waves. The fusing of the seawater entering into the camera to the latent photographic image, began to hold my attention more so than the recording of a recognisable image of the sea.
