KEEM is a collaboration between artists Kate Elliott and Emma McGarry. It was established in 2011, as an exploration into the nature of collaboration. Through methodology, ongoing discussion and debate, KEEM produces work which continuously questions subjectivity, materiality and identity.


Wednesday 23 October 2013

An excerpt from 'Ambient Notes: A Chain of Wooded Mountains' by Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau

Perching, posing. Again, these angles, when you start to think about the causal chains that led you to take this exact photograph it seems so unlikely that anything could ever happen at all.

Are you really closer to the shore? Or is it the camera? These aren't questions I want answering.

I've thought about shadows and about how sometimes shiny things leave shadows of light. But they aren't shadows are they? That's just a misappropriation of the term.

(I want to address this as a sensual experience. Travel, photography, writing. Photographs are sensual anyway, the depiction of light bouncing off objects. It seems obvious when you write it down. All photography is sensual, the shining skin of the world.)

In the darkness, photographs are always the product of a battle between light sources. Which one will make its mark?

There is a separation, in these, between you as a pair. To be the subject of the photograph is to be separated off from the photographer by the camera. Space split by the shutter. You travel together, but the camera keeps you apart.

(I always thought that taking a photograph of someone in a place makes it obvious that you can't experience that place in the same way at the same time. It would be wonderful to be able to somehow forget that either of you ever travelled as individuals, because once you've left a place, you aren't there any more, but the things you saw might still be.)

In bed, or under fluorescent light; carved off spaces, like petrol stations in the night. Driving past. They spin by. Windows of trains that aren't your train. You can't see your own window, or you don't think about the glass as you look out.


The above excerpt is taken from a specially commissioned text for KEEM's publication A Chain of Wooded Mountains, written by artist and writer Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau.

We are currently trying to raise funds to publish a limited edition print-run of the book - to help us do this, whilst getting your hands on a beautiful limited edition print (all proceeds go towards publishing the book), please click here. Plus you'll then be able to read the above text in full!

No comments:

Post a Comment