SPACE BETWEEN SPACE publication extract:

GS: … Having immediate contact and connection with materials of artworks, and their processes, creates much more of an ingrained memory too. During my Masters, I investigated the primary viewing experience of two immersive works. In both works, i discovered that a direct connection with the materiality of the works, sensed through the feet, not only reinforced my bodily presence within the artwork and space but also created an enduring link through memory - like the Ancient Greek and Roman Method of Loci, of imagery mnemonics, linking materials with locations.

Primary viewing also allows the trace of hand, of making and curating, to be more apparent. That relates a little to what you said about your interest in working within a gallery of … traces of what came before - Doreen Massey’s pincushion of a million stories.

You use a process of editing in your photo-works that create shifts between spaces and time. Are you using the images to refer to this more direct connection through memory, trace of process, event and story - ‘the pincushion’?

DG: … Yes, also my interest in editing is again linked to Massey’s idea of space as being a constant work-in-progress. I feel like System [Gallery] is a constant work in progress, exhibition fold into one another […] Each exhibition makes it’s mark and revises what System is …

GS: … Whereas, I prefer my photographs to have as little editing as possible, digitally. However, I often integrate them into more structural works, to actively reposition the viewer. I use them to draw attention to the action of seeing and sensing by creating shifts between understanding of ‘now’, between the spatial and temporal ‘now’ of when the photograph was taken and the ‘now’ of viewing. The gap and pause between these two events, creates a space, an instant, the viewer can inhabit. George Kubler refers to this instant, between events, as the instant of actuality […] when the lighthouse is dark between flashes […] the instant between the ticks of a watch […] It is the void between events. Yet the instant of actuality is all we can ever know directly […]

(George Kubler: The Shape of Time, The Instant of Actuality)