I don’t photograph biscuits, that’s not what I do. Sophy Rickett and Bettina von Zwehl at the Benjamin Stone archive

 

I visited the current small exhibition of Sophy Rickett and Bettina von Zwehl at the City Library in Birmingham, which is their response to the Sir Benjamin Stone archive; and to view both the Daniel Meadows retrospective, which is quite impressive.

This is the third work I have seen that responds to that archive, Anna Fox’s ‘Back to the Village’ was inspired by it and I went to listen to a talk by Faye Claridge last year as she spoke about her residency working on the archive . Before attending the talk by these two collaborators I went to see the work (definitely a work in progress), which is on display very near the Daniel Meadow’s work.

But back to the collaboration. As the work is displayed/mounted I could sense the ‘openess’ of the work, how by the images are placed within the mount they provoke a response to the plate as a whole. These plates all have five images, even if an image is a text and even if the image is missing, because the mount has apertures for five images (the structure of the plates are similar – one central large aperture surrounded by four further apertures in the corners of the plates). This plate structure implies a determined placement of imagery, as if there was an association between those on a similar plane, connected by a purpose.

And text. Text which provided an anchor it seems, to the plates of images; seeding/suggesting/implying a narrative direction from which to drift from or to, even if that might be sub-conscious perambulation. I wondered about the presentation and soon after the talk at BIAD later in the early evening started I could see how that came about.

Sir Benjamin Stone’s collection appear in album’s: album 46 for example is titled “types of English, French and Russian women” – and page after page are photographs of women, interestingly there is no denotation of which women came from which country, just pages of female portraits looking out at the viewer, almost as catalogue entries, and perhaps they were.

Rickett and von Zwehl had landed upon Album 31 as their entry (not an easy task it appears) into the archive. Album 31 is entitled “miscellaneous” – though no explanation as to why these images became privileged to be entered in that album, but no matter – it is there they reside. The collaborators used the visual artifacts of album 31 to work out their response and thereby answering my earlier question.

The talk was interesting from a number of perspectives: it was clearly unrehearsed and founded on a PowerPoint presentation with all of it’s traducing potency fully realized. The initial thoughts that were expressed was about their collaborative methodology, and this talk was about how that approach was echoed by the ‘collaborativeness’ of the talk – each taking the lead or withdrawing easily as if the language they spoke was one, but without disguising the ‘seperatedness’ of their travels to the starting point of this work together. It was engaging, serious, often amusing and the talk was better for this unrehearsed, almost haptic, approach.

There were distances between the two artists, most notably when discussing their personal practices, and whilst not meaning to appear pejorative in that assessment because their delivery when talking about their own work was not about the two of them, but a reflection of themselves as a working artist– the collaboration though – which had its own, completely ‘other’ character.

The other significant thought that I took away with me was about the work itself, how these artists, with a common voice, had interpreted the archive and made another piece of work. Similar to the work of Fox and Claridge, whose personal perspectives delivered equally individually voiced reactions, the work presented here gave yet another. Making more work from a base settled in late nineteenth and early twentieth century imagery might enable a freer interpretation and departure from the original photographic presentations. However this work employs very personal work, work that was both discarded but revered enough to not be jettisoned; these artists took from their own archives images that were perhaps consigned to their own miscellaneous album. Images that still had some reason not to be shredded, but without the original target left in them; their resurfacing through the editing process provided the ability to recontextualize themselves. Rickett spoke purposefully about the shifting contestability of images – losing the ‘preciousness’ of the images, how once they meant or spoke about one thing but through the mediation of time and memory they are given permission to present another element in another narrative. Images of half eaten biscuits photographed on impulse for their beauty and resonance, as they lie discarded by a daughter on the wooden floor.

These two artists met every Thursday and went through the process of curating images (text as imagery as well) until coming collaboratively to an agreement. They spoke about how that process would reveal information about themselves to themselves, how sometimes there were disagreements, sometimes evident in the work itself, how it wasn’t all sweetness and light.

I am interested in ‘Open’ works, about the free interpretation of artworks and this collaborative venture by Rickett and von Zwehl presents this viewer with a set of short episodes in a narrative of my own making, their presentation of such a scale that it needed close examination, a strategy that drew me closer to the work and helping to exclude extraneous confusions.

A quite inspiring evening.

 

Objects in the Field

Reprinted by kind permission of the artist Sophy Rickett

The Space that hosts the ‘Objects in a Field’ exhibition at the Camilla Grimaldi Gallery is a new space, recently opened it isn’t well indicated on the outside and enjoying the torrent of rainfall on the Old Burlington Road whilst trying to hunt down the entrance was an act of determination. Rickett’s work had been pointed out to me by my tutor and in particular the use of text, and so therefore I expected to see the text that I had already read being associated with the work. Not only did I not see it on the wall (the text was available as a booklet) but it was being read by Dr Willstrop (i) in a video presentation; the second of two disjuncture’s to deal with on the day. I had previously ‘read’ the text as a female narrator, so listening and viewing a man deliver the text provided an interesting challenge to how I had interpreted the narrative. Similarly I had ‘seen’ the images in a completely different scale to what I found on the wall.

Reprinted by kind permission of the artist Sophy Rickett

The image ‘Observation 111’ I had ‘seen’ as a moderately sized print, when in actuality the diameter of the ‘galaxial view’ is about a yard. This size invited this viewer to both stand back and admire the scale, but also to peer into the image, to try and make sense of the depth of detail; I find the notion of ‘space’ difficult to comprehend, the vastness, the seemingly endlessness of it all and the inconsequential nature of our existence in that limitless space. And by peering I noticed something that I had overlooked previously, at the top of the circle was a niche, which first reminded me of a ‘sun flare’, an ‘escape’ from the retaining forces that hold these huge vastnessess in check. It was a trigger that held me, something that I could grasp; it seemed to present a sense of scale, but when I looked at a couple of other similar exposures there was the same promontory at the same place on the print. I had a chat with one of the gallery staff who seemed to know a lot about Rickett’s work and she told me that it was a ‘North’ point; a register to provide calibration, which of course seemed a reasonable feature in a scientific instrument and then looking at ‘Observation 123’ I notice the twin variances; the image has been rotated and is printed in negative form. I checked with the artist and this was done for purely aesthetic reasons, saying also that it provided a greater dynamic; I’m not so sure about the dynamic change, I inverted it to see how it looked, but then my monitor isn’t large enough to test the hypothesis, I think the image of the comet would be dynamic in whichever form it is displayed.

An integral part of the exhibition, of which the images are but part, is the use of narrative. There is a pamphlet of ten sides which is a text about a couple of things, the first about the artist meeting with Dr Willstrop but also about when she had her eyes tested, or perhaps more accurately her reaction to the process by which she had her eyes tested. The words though are spoken by Dr. Willstrop on a video which is being constantly played. Again I am surprised to hear these words, which are very clearly set in my mind as those of the author being spoken by someone else, a man. That this someone else is the catalyst that provoked the work at the Institute of Astonomy is a delightful contrivance; the video has him grinding the glass lens that he use in the telescope he has retired from, glass is the means by which we are allowed to insulate ourselves from and also by which we can amplify their existence in the frame of view, lenses draw things closer, present them, shield us, open up vistas decoupled by a medium that allows only light to penetrate leaving all other senses devoided of interaction. The narrative is the adhesive element by which this whole project seems to coalesce and aesthetic choices about position and scale, leaflet and video are all supportive of that chronicling of the artist’s experience.

(i) See Photoparley piece here