Home: Privacy, Security, and Comfort

Idealised Notion of A Perfect Home

It Was A Sunny Smile

"It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living."

F.Scott Fitzgerald

To Contemplate is to Look at Shadows

"To contemplate is to look at Shadows"

Victor Hugo

Continuing the documentation of shadows cast by objects in the windows of the studio - here using a different camera phone that casts a blue hue to the shadows. Interestingly to note the phrase Shadow Image is the direct translation of the Chinese word for photography.

Venice: The Intimacy of Night #2

'Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.'

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Wanderings through Havana

"Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little more objectivity than usual. It was often on trips that he thought most clearly, and made the decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary."

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

Journeys: To seek others

"We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls."

Anaïs Nin

A Last Day of Summer

Part of film footage made of the sunset at Coney Island, Brooklyn NY on Labor Day - the symbolic end of summer in America. 

Auvers-sur-Oise

"Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy - one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself."

F.Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

Window Shadows #2

An ongoing exploration of shadows cast on the studio windows.

Venice: The Intimacy of Night.

The photographs are part of an ongoing exploration of the strange city of water that is Venice.

On a previous post (February 2011) I have shown sketchbook pages of my time in Venice. Drawings that depict architectural elements combined with graphical symbols & typography from my experience of the city. Rather than depicting single scenes, the drawings evoke rhythms to capture the flow of Venice, combining both real & photographic reference.

The tension between pictorial figuration & a flattened graphic perspective interests me much, helping to formulate a personal viewpoint & sense of place.

In conjunction with the drawings I am filming the city at night. I have a deep curiosity of the audio intimacy of Venice during night time & I'm gradually developing this into a short film piece. There is also recognition of how the image of Venice as reflection is a metaphor for this strange fairy tale like city, a stage for the tourist's gaze, an heightened sense of it's image. How the very architecture, the fine facades are but decoration for visual consumption. A work in progress at present, but I find the journey of such explorations useful in understanding my own creative practice & what the work is about.


also see:
http://reportager.uwe.ac.uk/projects12/mills/venice.htm

Drawing Process: Vietnamese handmade Bamboo Beaded Curtain

Installation of a traditional handmade bamboo beaded curtain depicting Ho Chi Minh City, for the Vietnamese Festival at Spitalfield Market. What fascinated me most in this commission was the translation of a drawing into a pixelated form via a craftsman in Vietnam (see previous post). Once hanging the image only emerged when viewed at certain angles.