Going through the various images thus far, I’ve become a little concerned that they are too “concrete” and less reflective of such scenes as they exist in memory.
To try something a little different I bought a fog generator.
The idea was to use the fog generator to create a thick and ambient fog and then to project the images taken thus far through the mist onto a piece of white board and photograph that.
Truth is, the first few images looked okay and then the camera fires as the board collapsed (because of the build up of moisture caused by the fog machine).
The moment of the board’s collapse was captured in camera.
Now that image was suddenly more interesting. Part of the image was out of focus, part of it in focus and there was a kind of falling, or pulling apart of the image with an indelible black line ripping through the image.
This accident corresponds far better with the theme of my work. This mixture of collapse, of the indelible black line of my mother’s departure cutting always being there to a degree, fear of future separation, of unstable ground and so on.
It also corresponds with my explorations of chronotypes in the work of Mikhail Bahktin and it relates to my own project. Which times and spaces fit feature in my narrative? How? To what end? There is a split in the time – then and now, but a continuance of space: the there. Or the Other Mother.
So I recreated that moment with all of the other images, one after the other. I went to get other boards, of different colours and played with angles and separations.
And it has made something else work too – the inclusion of previous related work, which speaks more metaphorically to the experience and sense of being a child in these times and spaces. Drawing in previous images was a suggestion from Cemre Yesil. Actually not so much a suggestion as a question. But it got me thinking. And rethinking and re-working.
One issue with the images at present is that the low resolution of the projector I bought for the last module of Mother Mothers is too low.
If I ever wished to print these images for exhibition purposes at a larger size, the pixellation of the projections would be very visible. I would like them to be less visible, though perhaps not invisible, so I am trying to find a 4k projector I might hire to reshoot. I also want a better quality of colour output from the projector and a little more power.
