Over the last two weeks I have returned to the Cockatoo Island work and attempted to resolve a kind of impasse I felt in the progression of earlier ideas. I had found that as I developed the scenes their construction became increasingly complex, and less informal. I had begun to fixate on achieving an image where the disjuncture between the negative and positive elements of the work became less evident. This was, perhaps, a way of toning down the artifice of the set up – an attempt to make the image more ‘believable’. As the work became more complex in terms of it’s construction and post-production I was less able to make more intuitive responses, and I had an urge to pare back.
The work I have provisionally titled Dust Landscapes provided a way of thinking around the subject matter – a form of detour that allowed me to shift ideas laterally. Having returned to these diorama-like images I have begun to unpick some of the material elements of the work. In these last three images I have been more focussed on the process of their construction, giving greater significance to the material. At first these are like theatrical ‘flats’ cut from other photographs in which the object finds some kind of narrative role, but most recently (in Finch 2) I have begun to use an LCD screen, allowing the grain of the monitor to become evident in the final image.
