Activity - dislocation - landscape

My research uses video and film installation, photography and sound to understand spaces, autonomy and human agency. It is often produced as a result of travelling to relatively remote places in contrast to the familiar and urban contexts of contemporary art. The artwork produced frequently depicts a scenario that is operative at a limit point of civilisation and where human activity is colliding and combining with uncontained natural forces. In this regard, a key aim of this particular research output is to produce situations where a larger space is brought into contact with an individual, the distinction between them begins to break down, and each appears on the brink of folding into the other. The work aims to challenge and modify the dominant paradigms of formalism and representation that persist within moving image and photography in contemporary art practice. The research seeks to provide new insights within video, in particular by tracing its lineage through the aesthetic concerns of painting as much as moving images within a gallery situation. By avoiding conventional emphases on either formal or representational modalities, and through exploring a coalescence of viewer, image, self and world, it attempts to devise an aesthetic understanding of complex ecosystems that are operative globally as much as locally and personally. Ultimately, this research seeks to raise questions regarding personal agency and the ability to truly know and predict the outcome of any action. This research, which was both internally and externally funded, has been presented in both academic and public contexts and formed the basis for successful applications to other art organisations