Loyola

Degree show video piece Loyola,(10mins single channnel colour video, sound) may be viewed at: http://vimeo.com/25271908

Degree Show Artist Statement

The work is concerned with the implications of new technology and how it is changing the way we, as a collective society, view ourselves and the world around us. On entering the term night service, a term found on a sign in a funeral home, into Google image, a spectrum of life from across the globe presented itself. In embodying these digital images into physical form I aim to reassess their value and the value information holds in the digital age. When paired the images, from different times and places, become entangled, annihilating space with time. The internet is a vast resource pool, more photographs have been taken since 2006 than were taken in total between 1839 and 2005. This presents infinite opportunities for these relations to occur. The video of mobile phone masts investigates a contemporary state of belief in that which cannot be preceived. These sites are the primary dissemination points of information today.

“For those who believe, no words are necessary. For those who do not believe, no words are possible”. Saint Ignatius de Loyola (1491-1556)

Degree Show Photographs

Thomas Dammann Award

This April I recieved an award from the Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust for my proposal to embark on a study of Orthodox religious icons and their use of time. Icon painters strove to create an image free from time, in 1990 Bill Viola, a prominent American Video artist wrote “One of the most striking things about medieval religious art is that the landscape (for us the material prima; the physical, hard, “real” stuff of the world) appears as a backdrop subordinate to the religious vision… Space is a radiant gold and is substantially less real than the spiritual reality… From our point of view, the inner and outer worlds have reversed their roles.” (P.478. Video Black – The Mortality of the Image. Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video.) 

In icons the sacred events are not located in earthly space and time. Icons do not convey the rhythms and energy of ordinary life; instead there is an absence of agitation; angels, saints and apostles enact scenes against a background of silence and eternity. Light and shade are not rendered in the western way because, in icons, Christ and the saints are themselves the source of illumination. Unlike contemporary culture icons maintain their relevance by remaining the same for centuries.


In September I will travel to Moscow and Istanbul Athens and Thessalonica.