Output details

Concrete Firmament

The image sequence for this exhibition explored formal and psychological qualities of road tunnels, and links between spatial experience and the triggering of remembered experience with reference to Merleau Ponty’s concept of expanded space; spaces no longer perceived for themselves but extending the scope and radius of touch.

The images were produced during a three-month residency at the British School at Rome (2009/10) using as prompts video footage shot on Italian motorways during 2008. The film employed tunnels as a formal device to consider journeys between sites of spiritual/cultural importance (e.g. between San Vitale, Ravenna mosaics and Fra Angelico’s monastic cell frescoes in San Marco, Florence).

The research process involved transforming passing, illusory fragments into energised hallucinatory spaces, using a personalised medium and process developed over ten years. Specific tunnel spaces considered triggered memory, informed by Simonides ancient notion of ‘memory palace’, in which memory is stored through use of particular environments. The work also reinterprets Freud’s notion that all tunnel-like spaces concern the vagina or womb, establishing additional connections to the cave, to museum culture, and to ecclesiastical space.

The sequence employed a methodological shift – figurative transcriptions of still frames from film sequences were subjected to excessive chemical dissolution and further improvisation – to juxtapose photographic, cinematic, and painterly elements, and to fuse unrelated emotions, such as fear and nostalgia. An extremely thin layer of graphite was deployed throughout, to emphasise correspondence with film as ‘skin’, and as projection.