My work engages with the awkwardness of in-between states, between order and disorder, probability and improbability, abstraction and representation, chance and reason. This tension is achieved via a system of ‘rules’ or framework, which are approached with an air of purposeful vagueness. These ‘rules’ allow a removal of ‘self’ from production, an entropic structure from which the work is expected to assemble itself. However this removal is granted to be diminished or augmented accordingly, allowing the rules to be rewritten within the process of writing. Whereby the boundary between chance and reason, control and discovery collapses, we witness a controlled discovery. The ‘framework’ has no set formation, but rather can be applied to any object or media. This framework may serve as the camera, or my lack of knowledge of it. By using unwittingly, and later wittingly ‘bad’ photographic techniques, by ignoring the cameras functions, I allow perceived accident to form the image. The photographic print no longer serves as an assumed ‘extension’ of reality, but as a tool of expression, of interpretation, from which to paint rather than to depict. These photographic and filmic subjects are often taken from the mundane, such as documenting the journey from my childhood home of Manchester, to my place of study, Leeds. Here the camera’s filter allows ambiguity, a ‘vagueness’, to mystify the everyday, toying between familiarity and unhomeliness, between depiction and abstraction.

 

Contact:

Email - emmysimpson.one@gmail.com