To Stand and Stare: A Somerset Landscape
I have lived in the Somerset Landscape for 30 years and To Stand and Stare: A Somerset Landscape is mine and Terry Flaxton's attempt to place people’s lives as they are lived, in relation to the swirling advent of digital media that has overcome modern life. A Somerset Landscape begins with a well-known poem from 1871 by W H Davies: “What is this life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare”? |
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The simple question informs the task we asked of both ourselves and the viewer: certainly it follows documentary form, but it is also an attempt to engage with Bill Viola’s dictum ‘Duration is to Consciousness, as light is to the eye’. Here we ask you to allow your gaze to slip back into a sensibility where you imbue the work with your attention rather than interrogate and interpret it – this latter can be done after viewing.
To Stand and Stare took us six years to edit, to find the form - and we hope that it is in the durational aspect of this work that the truths we seek to discover about modern life through the lens of long-practiced crafts, are revealed.
Please watch without distraction and expect to let the ideas wash over you, rather be 'entertained'. If you give this piece your attention it will reveal itself in a heartwarming and thoughtful way and give you back the attention you put in, with a little bit more...
To Stand and Stare took us six years to edit, to find the form - and we hope that it is in the durational aspect of this work that the truths we seek to discover about modern life through the lens of long-practiced crafts, are revealed.
Please watch without distraction and expect to let the ideas wash over you, rather be 'entertained'. If you give this piece your attention it will reveal itself in a heartwarming and thoughtful way and give you back the attention you put in, with a little bit more...
The Aspen Papers
The Aspen Papers is a short dramatic piece intended to be projected either a straight single screen piece or alternatively into a Gauze 'Cave' (as mentioned in re:staging photography this is a 10 foot x 10 foot cube draped with gauzes or muslin, where in this case the video is projected into the same space that members of the audience go into and experience the work as an immersive space).
Exhibited at a group show in VENICE 2022 |
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This is a 5 minute video showing the 2023 staging of many of the works on this site - opening with Exodus: The Red Cloak. Use the full screen control on the video for a closer look.
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