The video work ‘Transitions’ documents my daily journey and is recorded through one entire day from climbing out of bed to returning to sleep.

The work represents an act of mindfulness, attending to the constant change of environment capturing every change of space (moving from one space to another) or surface under foot, and explores my interest in our physical relationship and interaction with our architectural environment. The process requires my constant attention, focusing my mind and awareness and captures the narrative of that attention. The chronologically presented clips, captured using a mobile phone, highlight the ever present eye of digital media and questions this often criticised source of distraction and how we perceive our relationship with technology, each other and our surroundings.

Transitions

This book project encapsulates one journey in a multitude of themes and experiences that epitomise our often mundane daily journeys. Shot on film using a 35mm half frame camera, this collection of 32 diptychs were shot chronologically on one journey, my daily journey to work, as presented. Each pair of images are physically tied together through the materiality of film and present scenes or objects that are in close proximity and therefore in direct relationship with each other in space; this book simply serves to draw attention to them.  

Journey Vol. 1, 2017
Card, paper, embroidery floss, bees wax, thermal pigment prints.
Size: 21cm x 30cm

JOURNEY VOL. 1

A significant part of my reflections over the last few years have been about the relationship between my artist and teacher identities and how I make links and find modes of intersection between them. This work explores that discourse.

I remember visiting the History of Science Museum in Oxford and seeing an original copy of Anna Atkins book on British Algae made using the cyanotype process, and realised I was in the presence of an object that had been handled by its maker but also the paper must have travelled with her, been in contact with the samples she collected before being assembled into a book form. The pages had a history all of their own.

In this series of works, the sheets are made by my students, coating materials with cyanotype chemistry in preparation for making their own images. The edges of the paper marked out as they are coated in chemistry. Layered in time, sometimes over a single lesson, sometimes over days or weeks. The students presence, their marks made in the process of making, their sharing of space and materials are present in these works, poetic epitaphs, archeological documents. They tell a narrative story of my identity in relation to my students; I lay out the sheets, tape them in place, mix the chemistry, set out the brushes, demonstrate the process. The students work in response, tentatively at first, then more boldly, exploring different materials, brush strokes, ideas. Their actions, intentions, and creative energy are captured in these sheets. The students move on having explored, developed and learned and this is what they leave behind, an indelible mark of our time together.

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John A. Blythe

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