William Curwen Artists Statement
Essay For My Show At Rhue Arts in April 2021:- ‘Light Is Liquid’
There was a time towards the end of my career as a professional photographer when I was increasingly asked by picture editors, acting as messengers for their corporate committees, ‘to go out and find the camel we have designed to win our client’s race in the marketplace’. Invariably, I would return with a sharp and shiny picture of a racehorse, with the response that ‘we asked for one hump - not two’! Strangely enough, I always thought I was chasing wild mustangs. At the end of my long and distinguished shelf life, I gave up professional practice to gradually become the artist I am today.
When I first arrived here twelve years ago to stay and live in the North West Scottish Highlands, I was puzzled by my observation that although my initial photographs were technically competent and aesthetically pleasing, they lacked any real sense of empathy with my intensely new surroundings. Instead, they spoke to me of a life left behind with all its cultural baggage and emotional psychic chatter, still echoing around my soul as an inevitable consequence of a self imposed exile - the disconnect was that intense. It took me two winters before I even began to understand the mountain light and climate here. How social isolation within a sparsely populated landscape compels me to think very deeply about who I am, and what can be done with what I can be.
At around 2010, I realised I was no longer really all that interested in taking sharp and shiny photographs in sharp and shiny light of ‘places with glorious names and recognisable features’. I had already begun to feel an ever deepening reverence towards my surroundings way beyond my once fanciful imagining of ever lassoing the free spirit of the eternally elusive wild mustang.
And so, what to do? How does one capture the essence of something that is ‘free’ and by definition, cannot ever be captured? The answer eventually dawned on me - with the right attitude of mind and spirit, the ‘free’ will be naturally drawn to the artist, and reveal itself as an indivisible part of what is the unmistakable real me. I no longer look for pictures, I believe they are out there waiting for me to walk into them. And when this happens, I am rooted to the spot as I carefully unpack and set up my camera rig. Then I climb right in alongside the wild mustang patiently waiting for me.
Ahhh, my beloved high dynamic range digital panoramic pinhole camera rig - as cobbled together over many years of trial and tribulation! I had grown tired of conventional landscape photography with its self imposed tyranny of ‘the decisive moment’ as seen through highly computed razor sharp refractive glass optics that make everything look luxuriously dead. So, I decided to get back to my optical roots and began to work with diffracted light as recorded through the use of a pinhole lens.
By definition a pinhole is not really a lens as such, but a carefully crafted hole without an opinion upon whatever light is passing through it. Neither sharp or not sharp, with everything in focus, or not in focus. It observes light reflected from a surface as an overlapping defractive pattern recording shape or form, but without the deadening distraction of excessive detail. This I believe is an important distinction of how human vision works. So much of what we actually see as an initial first impression is based upon luminosity of form. It is the intellectual construction and analysis of said detail which immediately follows that tells us the meaning of what we see. In real life this adaptive process is continuously selective. Within digital photographs it becomes narrow and oppressive.
In other words:- ‘light is liquid’.
The pictorial scenes that lay in wait until I walk into them and reveal themselves to me, are recorded through an array of accurately aligned overlapping frames arranged in rows and columns comprised of many thousands of digital exposures, usually made over several hours. Of course, it is mechanically impossible to achieve true pixel to pixel accuracy of exposure alignment within camera while out on location, and so a workable compromise is made during digital computer post production and image manipulation. The myriad of minute errors of parallax eventually average themselves out to create an image digitally ‘stitched’ together as one that is vast in size, and easy on the retina to quickly become alive in the minds eye. To successfully ‘read’ what I now refer to as an ‘optical painting’ can and does take as long as one wants. The more one looks, the more one sees - much akin to how a child can see a bedtime story as read to them come to life in fresh air right before their very eyes.
These printed optical paintings are huge in size, anywhere between up to 5 x 5 metres either in width or height or both. The onerous logistics of display and storage of such large artworks are well known, and so I have devised a relatively simple method of construction using a mosaic of small tiles made from inkjet prints glued to and bound around squares of grey-board. Thus, by way of example, out of a series of ten artworks, the largest is 4 x 2 metres in length and height, made from 325 square tiles that are 135 x 135mm each in size within a matrix of 25 columns and 13 rows. As each square neatly matches up to its surrounding neighbours, there is a perfect and uninterrupted visual continuity of the entire image. Because the rows and columns of square tiles are made up of uneven numbers, they form a compositional matrix that encourages the viewer to willingly further suspend their sense of disbelief. The end result can be safely packed up and put away in a box small enough to be easily carried elsewhere with just two hands.
Choosing a suitable location within the landscape to reconnoiter takes time and careful planning. Setting up and getting a successful set of exposures needs a certain state of mind that often takes days to recover from. You can turn up on location prepared for anything and everything, and find the unexpected always happens. Digital post production can involve hundreds of hours of work. It can be and often is, exhausting. Eventually, you have forgotten whatsoever how the original scene actually looked like. You know that it is permanently cauterised somewhere deep inside the brain, and within all those countless digitised fragments of diffracted light is a memory of a memory that is alive and infinitely more human than the original singular experience of standing behind the camera. I call this ‘the indecisive moment of mutual recognition’. I would like to think there is no one else out there doing what I am doing. I feel that as an artist, I have finally discovered something very valuable to share with the viewer. This is what I do, and I own it.
With the world the way it has become, we have now completely overrun our planet and turned on it. I think of my pictures as optical paintings made from recorded memories of places that have adopted me, and represent what they looked like at the very moment just before we turned up, and a very long time after we have left and gone on to somewhere else. A world we are all made from and the only one we have. Something to keep for our children and everything else that lives in it with them.
Will Curwen
2nd April 2021