9th International Photography Festival, Format

The Time of The Artist (2019) was a collaborative research activity between Rhiannon Jones (S.H.E.D Artistic Director) and Simon Burrows (S.H.E.D Master Builder and MA Fine Art Photographer, Nottingham Trent University) for Format, International Photography Festival (2019). They produced a series of photographic images taken to document the construction and building of S.H.E.D, a wooden mobile arts space. This research project makes a nod towards an exchange between Roland Barthes and John Berger (1981), in which Barthes describes how original photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinet-making and the machinery of precision: cameras were clocks for seeing, and the photographic mechanisms, the living sound of wood. The relationship between making, wooden structures, documentation of time and photography are ideas place at the centre of this enquiry. The resulting curated works are a selection of photographic sculptures to explore a shared interest in the architectural and sculptural possibilities of the photographic form. Rhiannon Jones and Simon Burrows adopted a curatorial approach to installing the works that treated the works and the process as though they were building S.H.E.D. In doing this, they were playing with the concept of construction, shape and form through the act of hanging photographic prints – resulting in the use of nails, screws and bolts to hang and suspend the works. The resulting sculptural prints allude to the architectural lines, wooden form and the different possible configurations of S.H.E.D. The photographic works made manifest the poetics of how a wooden structure, like that of S.H.E.D provides a ghostly mnemonic to how Roland Barthes (2004) describes photographic mechanisms as the living sound of wood. The resulting works, curatorial and hanging processes generated a discourse on fading techniques, and new technologies within photographic practice. The prints also allude to the architectural transformation of S.H.E.D through their sculptural shape and structure. Making visible the poetics of how a place traditionally used in the UK for storage has become a touring arts space designed for dialogue. Their collaborative practice operates at the intersection between theory and practice, playing with notions of immediacy and developmental processes in both artistic research and photographic development. The research activity furthered their thinking around the reconfiguring of the shape and form of S.H.E.D as a structure, facilitated through the production of this series of photographic images of S.H.E.D for Format.Format Festival University of Derby Nottingham Trent Universit