HOTEL ROOM SERIES (Working title)
The ‘Hotel Room Series’ will break into three projects, Soho London, Paris and Northern Spain. I will create narratives based around three different characters, one for each story. The ideas will come from personal experience, imagination, books, film and photography (with a dash of music). This project is still in the research stage.
‘Pedestal’ (seen on the ‘Hotel Room’ page) is inspired by several excerpts (see below) from the book ‘Dancer from the dance’ by Andrew Holleran. This is a narrative based around New Yorks thriving gay subculture in the late sixties, early seventies, just pre AIDS epidemic.
‘ A moral man is essentially dumbfounded when confronted by a man who is amoral-everything the latter does is met with a certain disbelief’.
‘Imagine a pleasure in which the moment of satisfaction is simultaneous with the moment of destruction: to kiss is to poison; lifting to your lips this face after which you have ached, dreamed, longed for, the face shatters, every time’.
‘You know, when people who were once religious no longer believe in God, they never really change; they just go on, hunting for the ecstatic food, trying to satisfy that hunger’.
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The dangers of prescriptive ethics.
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Other Book references:
The Use of Photography - Annie Ernaux & Marc Marie
Letters to Eugene - Hervé Guibert & Eugène Savitzkaya
Film/TV references:
Mr Loverman - Hong Khaou, written by Bernardine Evaristo
Cinematography - Emmanuel Lubezki
‘Smoke & mirrors’ 13.5 x 9 cm. This is a study of Sienne (Siena), 1979, a photograph by Herve Guibert (writer & photographer). Here I have experimented with my mark making techniques through studying his use of high contrast natural lighting and delicate, emotive compositions. I started to explore his work after reading ‘Letters to Eugene’, in which Eugène Savitzkaya (writer) and Hervé Guibert share a changeable but largely affectionate correspondence, in which, they exchanged art, writing and introspections, though they rarely saw each other, as one was based in Liege, the other in Paris.
“How could it be otherwise? It’s not that I want to hide it, or that I want to boast about it arrogantly. But it’s the least I can do to be sincere. How can you speak about photography without speaking of desire? If I mask my desire, if I deprive it of its gender, if I leave it vague . . . I would feel as if I were weakening my stories, or writing carelessly . . . The image is the essence of desire and if you desexualise the image, you reduce it to theory.” Hervé Guibert.
WATERCOLOUR & INK BLOG
IDEAS IN PROGRESS
A YEAR OF LIVING - REFERENCE
‘At the time of making the series ‘A year of living’, I was emersed in the deeply poignant stories in Murikami’s book ‘Men without women’. One in particular stood out to me: it was about an older bachelor, who falls in love with a married woman; she leaves him and not long after, he is found dead. The man had simply grown thinner and weaker in the absence of his lover. “It was like he’d been buried in the ground, and should have been turned into a mummy […] He’d lost his soul and it wasn’t coming back.” I could relate to the idea of loss and grief having this kind of destructive quality to it.
I could also identify with the factual writings of Annie Ernaux, whose descriptions of her relationships, written so honestly, are permeated with a raw truth, reminiscent of the harsh unfiltered reality of childhood.
Compositionally I was attracted to Wolfgang Tillmans’ ‘Four Books,’ where his snapshot analogue (film) photographs build atmosphere and explore counter culture through abstracted images, using sequences to create narrative.
An alternative quote to: ‘Eroticism is the approval of life unto death’ Georges Bataille, would be: ‘Eroticism is not sex per se, but the qualities of vitality, curiosity, and spontaneity that make us feel alive.’ Esther Perel.
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Compositional ideas for two of the three potential series. Above left Soho London, above right Northern Spain.
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