Anne Robinson |
Artists Statement
When painting, I work with translation: through vision, gesture and material. Painting is always experimental: generating paint surfaces out of experience; out of inner vision or reflected light, embedding an experience of time, the dynamic past/present/future, in the painting itself
Making a piece of moving image art, I am experimenting with the building blocks of time and space made by the 'frame': time is made to pass before us at 25 frames per second and persistence of vision causes our brains to understand this as movement.
Some years ago, I began making work about the sea. My father was a sailor from a long line of sailors and I embarked on a journey of exploration through the fusion between the 'time codes' of the moving image and the measurement of time at sea: the crossing of time zones and the possibility time madness. By extension, I was hoping to explore the time of the work of art which becomes magical, extended, elastic, subjective: ' time outside time'.
The Alf series of paintings were made by painting repeatedly from the same image: a photo of my half brother Alf, who was lost at sea. Repetition produced slippage from picture to picture, in the paint surface itself. The Still series, also repetitive, is based on single frames and fragments from the film The Cruel Sea.
Single film frames have a heightened unsettling quality when isolated from causal or temporal flow and I have also re-filmed sequences to 'catch' the space between frames exploring this as a space of the imaginary. Hold (2007) and Returning (2006) use this 'curious eye' of re-filming and extreme slow motion. In An Occulting Light, I found that these experiments, for example in the sequence where the sailors head turns in the water and becomes transformed, even painterly, seemed to reveal something about the relation between vision and emotional 'affect': a haptic viewing experience where we grasp matter and emotion through the effects of light.
My recent video installation work Maybe in the Sky, aims to engage the viewer on a poetic journey, looking back through time at the stars in the night sky, inspired by telescopes bringing the faraway near. A solitary rower orbits the dome, progressing across the star-filled universe, momentarily lost, navigating filmed frames, telescopic visions and painted seas. A ship’s bell tolls, but here, time is elastic.
"..nothing is visible without light.. without instrument.." (Poussin).
Further details at:
www.londonmet.ac.uk/jcamd/research/rae-2008/anne-robinson/anne-robinson_home.cfm
www.aptstudios.org/gallery/past_07.html
www.independentsbiennial.org
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/wml/exhibitions/maybeinthesky/index.aspx