April 2004
Judy Thomas
Akenside Hill, Newcastle - Upon - Tyne. 20th February 2004
My work is about evoking memory and association.
We live in a time when so much of what we experience is manipulated and manufactured digitally. The images we see are so often controlled and created to suit exactly a particular purpose, whim or seduction. As a reaction to this I have been researching the still image created over a prolonged period of time. For the ARTVERT I created an image using an empty cider can and sheet of lithographic paper. I make images that are a reaction to the digital world we live in. They come about through chance. There is no predicting what they will look like until they have been made. There is a strong element of uncertainty when using pinhole photography. I left a series of hidden cameras (made with empty beer and cider cans) in various locations over night, in busy areas of the Bigg Market and the Quayside. Some of the cameras disappeared; some had to be retrieved from gutters. All were at the mercy of chance. Most of the images were the result of ten hours of exposure.
They all show familiar locations yet the final result is a very different image. My work encourages the viewer to step into another world. This world is a mysterious, fragile world of intimacy and the inexplicable. It is not important for the location of these images to be known. There is a strong sense of absence within them. The “present” in the images is achieved by this absence, rather than by presence. It is up to the viewer to imagine the scene, or what has happened, or what is about to happen in the spaces photographed. The transparent nature of the image is very dreamlike. There is a quality of something ghostly and indescribable. They possess a magical quality. This is something fleeting and temporary.
Showing an image in The Crack has been a privileged opportunity. It has enabled my work to be viewed by a large and varied audience. I hope the image made people think. I hope people looked at the date and the place and remembered where they had been at that time. Maybe the image challenged some readers to try and make sense of what it was. Finally, I hope, for some, the image was something poetic and beautiful.
