Variety With Identity is Possible

I've been interested in how I can begin to tell a narrative over a series of images for a while now; this is some work I made recently about looking at the same thing from three different points of view; playing on distance, from the microscopic to the epic. I'm looking at how it's possible to isolate something in a single image when it is supported by a sequence, while trying to get the biggest number of things from the smallest number of elements.

Variety with identity is possible, discussed by Peter Nencini.

Build it as a Monument to That Spirit Which is Yours - And Could Have Been Mine

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand has been one of my favourite books for a long time, and featured recently on my It's Nice That bookshelf, but I forgot to mention it was also released in 1949 as a film.

Howard Roark is Ayn Rand's embodiment of the human spirit, and his struggle represents the triumph of individualism over collectivism.

I find this an ever-increasingly relevant thought, as we work for ourselves, by ourselves and produce things that are not lost by anyone except us.

Czechoslovakia 1966-68

I started reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Berlin last summer (and I got so hooked I decided to make it last as long as possible). It is set in Prague in 1968 at the time of the Prague Spring soviet invasion, and plays on the effect of an individual's history to tell an incredibly descriptive story of the spaces between their relationships, and what divides them. I find these divisions really interesting - they are so often unspoken, instead we spend much of our lives concerned with things in common, likenesses, similarities, sameness; and I begin to wonder what the effect of having the same differences might be...




I love coincidences, so was happy to find myself watching Daisies by Vera Chytilová last night, which I'd been trying to find in 2004, but had forgotton I was looking for (the best kind of find...) Made in 1966 also in Czechoslovakia, it was banned immediately. It becomes an animated, torn up, stripped down aggressive collage; with some amazing visual treats hidden away in the elaborate ever-changing sets; giant leaves, flowers, isolated, pressed, pinned.

Reading and seeing them together, I feel like one is a visualisation of the spaces in the other. But of course this might just be random...

(Massachusetts Institute of Technology's student newspaper, The Tech, from 1971, on the use of the word random as a noun - "A person who happens to be in a particular place at a particular time, a person who is there by chance; a person who is not a member of a particular group; an outsider.")

Brussels / Amsterdam

Last week I took a train to Amsterdam (via the wonderful Place du Jeu de Balle fleamarket in Brussels) and met with some really great people, pets and things.