James McArdle
a
folio
of
work
Vortex:
Now
showing
at
Smyrnios
Gallery
13
April
to
1
May
2004
|
Where
is
the
way
amongst
these
staves
of
spindly
coppiced
trunks
and
over
the
broken
ground
that
leads
off
into
perplexity?
Confusion
and
chaos
confront
us
in
this
landscape.
To
make
images
of
it
challenges
even
sight. For a human being the landscape is understood in a transit which the camera’s glass cyclops forgets. How can one snatched moment indicate a sense of direction that only the span of time can return? But with two eyes, from where we stand we are in two places at once, and at two points in our course. |
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This
product
of
our
physical
evolution,
photography
imitates
with
the
familiar
stereo
pair.
The
device
blends
two
unyieldingly
parallel
lines
of
vision
so
that
our
eyes
can
reconstitute
a
three
dimensional
scene.
But
it
is
cardboard
scenery,
containing
only
an
expectation
of
space
and
missing
the
skeleton
dimension
of
time. |
In
life
our
whole
biology,
our
socketed
eyes,
mobile
head,
articulated
body,
participates
in
searching
our
space.
As
our
eyes
focus
they
converge.
Attention
is
a
convergence
on
particulars. |
What
you
might
see
about
to
happen
in
my
photographs
too,
has
happened.
They
often
look
like
family
photographs.
Marriages
have
failed,
children
been
born.
I
can
know
this
because
I
know
the
people.
But
the
photograph
comes
before,
it
is
'Before'
and
because
the
subjects
are
anonymous
the
viewer
cannot
know
what
comes
after
any
more
than
I
can
tell
you
what
they
will
do
tomorrow.
In
this
way,
what
starts
as
a
document
ends
looking
as
much
a
like
fiction
as
a
predictive
biography
might,
if
there
is
such
a
thing.
|
""These images come to me from discoveries I make when walking amongst the ruins and traces of old settlements in the Central Goldfields - its a time when I think about my life and the people in it, musing also on the lives of other people who inhabited the area one hundred and more years ago. Amongst the glitter of quartz and shale fragments I might catch the white of a piece of porcelain, a shard from a discarded plate or washbowl or cup. "When scratched out of the clay most are disappointingly blank, but many are patterned with designs sun-bleached to a startling cerulean. Occasionally a revelation is made - distant hills, a building, rowers, a fountain, figures in an imagined idyllic landscape that existed on someone's crockery. Perhaps the design was chosen and treasured for the way it reminded them of a distant home or brought something beautiful into hard lives. "Usually, I make portraits of people and relationships using the environment of the photograph as a way of revealing and understanding them. Portraits are an attempt to describe a person's life in one image - a ridiculous undertaking, but one that for me is the most important form of art because (if they are good) they become treasured as miniatures or fragments of real people. These pictures are portraits too, but the environment consists of these found patterns and images and the lives inlaid on them are real, remembered or imagined.". |