FMP Guest critique

HildeMaassen
Aug 11, 2020
3 min read

Two days ago We had a group session with Len, Glodagh and me meeting with Dinu Li. I sent a large pdf with all the work I have done since starting the FMP and got really good questions to answer.

What is your audience and what do you want them to feel?

My audience I think is a gallery/ museum public and I want them to experience and feel wonderment. I want them to show what is beyond photography and the subject is clouds.

I was told that the work was kind of scientific, with a hang on folklore and nostalgie. Some of the images foreboding and threatening. Sublime was mentioned. I studied the sublime a bit before and wrote a blogpost on it: https://maassen3.wixsite.com/blog/post/sp-w11-sublime

Dinu subscribed it as being so amazing that one for draw to it to toch it, see it but then being close to go back. He compared it to child that went to the ocean with his parents for the first time and run to it to go backwards, being scared to dip its feet in there.

He told me to immediately start with the vinyl record idea and forget about everything else. The idea was this unique and good that if I didn't bring it out in the world someone else would.

He told me to see the work of Olafur Eliasson which I already studied a bit and posted in https://maassen3.wixsite.com/blog/post/fmp-1-2-1-no-3-and-participants

His work also asks questions of "what is beyond" and is always about earth and nature.

In The Weather Project installation Olafur Eliasson explores ideas about experience, mediation and representation with the weather as the subject.

In this installation, The Weather Project, representations of the sun and sky dominate the expanse of the Turbine Hall. A fine mist permeates the space, as if creeping in from the environment outside. Throughout the day, the mist accumulates into faint, cloud-like formations, before dissipating across the space. A glance overhead, to see where the mist might escape, reveals that the ceiling of the Turbine Hall has disappeared, replaced by a reflection of the space below. At the far end of the hall is a giant semi-circular form made up of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps. The arc repeated in the mirror overhead produces a sphere of dazzling radiance linking the real space with the reflection. Generally used in street lighting, mono-frequency lamps emit light at such a narrow frequency that colours other than yellow and black are invisible, thus transforming the visual field around the sun into a vast duotone landscape.

He told me to look at the book "photography is magic" by Charlotte Cotton, which I ordered.

I had a look at Alex Hartley for his series "Nowhere Island".

It started when Hartley went to the High Arctic in 2004 because there was an island that had been revealed from within the melting ice of a retreating glacier. HE moved the island into International Waters and it was declared a new nation: "nowhereisland" It was around the South West coast of England during the 2012 Olympic Games. People could become a citizen of the island that was broken up in peaces in the end that where sent to the 23,003 people from 135 countries who had signed up as "citizens of Nowhereisland". A small piece of the island was sent to the upper-stratosphere.