GOING WITH THE FLOW

For most of my creative life I have made films and videos – by definition a race through time. Yet I have increasingly felt the desire, the need, to detach the images I make from their subservient role, enslaved to the narrative, shackled to the argument. So now I choose to work with stillness, with movement implied rather than explicit. I seek to create points of reflection and contemplation, as a counterpoint to the dominant qualities of our culture, momentum, transformation and that most elusive of chimera, progress.

As an organizing principle for my picture-making, I have adopted the universal phenomenon of FLOW. Flow is the continuous, contained, directed movement that is manifest in material terms, as in the flow of water, air and all forms of life, and in abstract terms, as in the flow of ideas and time. Without flow there can be no existence.

As it has been for decades, my starting point for the images I make is close observation with the camera. What I seek to create is a representation of an act of seeing from within the landscape not an overview from its edge. Sometimes that act is a concentrated gaze, sometimes a glimpse, sometimes even a subconscious awareness rather than a moment of looking. My ambition is to trigger an emotional charge in the viewer, perhaps even a sense of recognition: “I am in this. This is in me. We are one.”

The scholar-artists of ancient China viewed the world from within and without in the same moment. And, to them, the idea of going with the flow was a moral principle as it was for the most renowned philosopher-scientist of our own era, Albert Einstein:

"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe ... We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive."

Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include:
Timeslip, Fringe Arts Bath (Artist/Curator) - Water, Tint-Art, Chichester - Creekside Open, APT Gallery, Deptford, London - TM13, Real Fonderia Gallery, Palermo, Sicily - Lyme Open 2013, Malthouse Gallery, Lyme Regis, Dorset (Prizewinner) - SCOPE, Miami, Florida - PhotoPlace Gallery, Middleton, Vermont - Colletiva 1, Garage Bonci, Pietrasanta, Tuscany - Immersive video presentation for Cultural Olympiad, ICCI 360 degree Arena, Olympic sailing venue, Weymouth, Dorset.

Film presentations and talks include: ICA, National Gallery, Tate and NFT, London - Modern, Oxford - Ikon, Birmingham - Orchard, Edinburgh and others across UK - Metropolitan, Whitney and Broadcasting Museums, New York - Pompidou Centre, Paris - National Gallery, Sydney.