My name is Hugh Parking. My name's Paul. My name's Mary Winkle. My name's Jack Park.
Will Thomson. The main reason I kind of wanted to get people together was just a general
lack of interaction and discussion not only within my own studio but a lot of
what I've talked to other people about is you know the complete lack of any
critical discussion or not only critical discussion but just a general kind
of togetherness on putting on shows. It's just a kind of continuation of the kind
of studio atmosphere of university where you share ideas and discuss things.
There's nothing particularly which characterizes my work or there's no
particularly common thread which goes through all the aside from the fact that I
work many video. I tend to have a lot of quite diffusing various interests and
that's generally why I tend to respond to my work. Two of the most recent works
that I've made I work with a composer mainly called Samia Lanney. We've made
two films this year. The first film was called Trust which was it was a response
to a friend of ours's magazine published called Trust. She asked Samia
to write a piece of music based on the theme of trust and he was struggling
with this a little bit and when he was kind of working away at one day trying
to think of who to trust his pet cat called the prawn bought into the room
and he immediately knew that was who he trusted. I made a video to go along with
the piece of music it ended up as a kind of quite a strange kind of gothic
horror film for no first person perspective or first cat perspective.
It's difficult to summarize my work into a kind of cohesive thing because
every project is really different and they always start with a period of
research and it's really one particular thing unexpected finding that drives
the rest of the project. The recent piece of work that I've made is a series
called Fate Planning Applications and I was really interested in the the rise
of kind of developments in the city. They're the pieces of paper that have to
get cited near the development to let people know about the fact that there's
going to be a building change so it's a chance for them to the public to get
in touch with the council and say you know they don't want it to happen. They
kind of take the formal qualities of a planning application or the address at
the top, the logo of the council but instead of being information they have
texts that are threaded through them and the text the two ones I've made most
recently one takes quotes from the book Learning from Las Vegas and the other one
is a conversation I had with a taxi driver while driving down Old Camp Road.
My recent work is about it's mainly concerns kind of our relationship to nature
with while living in an urban environment and kind of how it becomes
almost a commodity now and it's so far removed from its kind of natural worlds
in this state and we kind of how we tend to kind of edit it or shape it to
fulfill our aesthetic needs. I also paint a lot of images that are kind of
based within an interior where the boundaries between interior and
exterior influx and the breakdown of these boundaries is maybe well as me
discussing kind of our psychological and physical distance to nature so when it
comes in it's kind of symbolizing the breakdown of this showroom ideal one
example I could talk about is a painting called Vunderbaum and so with this I was
looking at you know it's kind of a traditional landscape you might see in
painting but seen through the screen with a constant reminder of consumers
for the capitalism in the corner of this out-of-place kind of tacky Christmas
tree almost and kind of trying to use different methods and different forms
of image to yeah sort of recontextualize maybe conventional styles or
languages of image production. That's a piece called Home Film Sketch and it was
part of it was a number two of three that I made and they were all short kind of
three or four minute sketches I see them as sketches for what I thought was
going to become a larger film and hasn't yet and this is something I'm kind of
starting to think about picking up again but which has been dormant for a
little while now which is how things sometimes tend to go with my work in it
I'll follow a particular thread and drop it at an unfinished point and then let me
come in later or maybe referenced through another group of work or there's a
kind of chaotic thing going on there as well. My work is mainly based around
societal politics and interaction with people between three different people
or between a different people or how people interact with artwork. I've done
political wood carvings and that's part of this series called Social Musings
which the main reason I created it was because I didn't necessarily know how
to create work about ongoing political situations it's kind of just a way of
getting things off my chest and then re-evaluating in time. So yeah I'm really
looking forward to exhibiting in York. I think for me particularly it's
interesting because lots of my works respond to local things so ten minutes
from where I live in London so taking it to another city I have to really think
about the audience in a way because you know if you don't live in that
vicinity how will you kind of understand these things so I'm quite like the
challenge of thinking okay how does this how do people take us on board when
they're not from there so I think it's a good it's a good challenge. There's
something about moving outside of that or there's something about kind of ideas
which you may become quite at home with an attached to a given location which are
worth reconsidering and like moving outside of that and going through a
different place is I think one really useful way of doing that. It just gives
me another opportunity to show some work and experiment. I think experiment is
probably the best you know showing with people as part of a group shows it's nice
and it's not muscly.
