Leeds Art Gallery: Exhibition (John Hilliard)

In one of my previous posts I wrote up the initial ideas and questions based around seeing John Hilliard's photographic prints in Leeds Art Gallery.

The series was called DECEMBER WATERS and each image (left to right) had the subtitles:

Running Black, Frozen White, Hanging Grey.

Over the next few days I did further research before creating my own interpretation to present in the Leeds Art Gallery on Friday 2nd December. Originally I borrowed some camera equipment (70-200mm lens and tripod) and went out to take some pictures. I planned to re-create a similar style using depth of field but looking at autumnal colours and landscapes as apposed to the bleak winter landscapes used in Hilliard's work. Unfortunately, after getting out to the location I realised I had left my memory card at home and due to the tight time scales I didn't have time to go back and do the shoot again.

For my own projects I had begun to look at the body, human form and shapes I decided this could be combined with the Hilliard project to bring my ideas to life. I used the same lens but worked with a continuous light in a dark area of the studio. I photographed other students using bodyparts such as the neck, arms and hands to create the below effects:

In keeping with Hilliard's work I decided to convert all the images to black and white, I liked how this made the images less recognisable as body parts and in some cases made them look more like landscapes. I purposefully chose to shoot all the images in landscape format as I thought it was interesting that John Hilliard had shot portrait images of a landscape and I wanted to therefore shoot landscape images of something you would usually take a portrait of.

Once I had chosen the images I liked and edited them into black and white, cropping to create the desired 'look'. I then began composing them into different sets of three as again I wanted to use the idea of a triptych. I think some flow a lot better than others. I chose my favourite images to be printed and mounted on the wall. For the prints I used a semi-transparent but smooth paper as I liked the depth of colour and the way it made the images into graphic objects rather than photographs. I think they could also be displayed in different ways in future, possibly playing with light. Below are a selection of photographs from the gallery showing how I chose to hang my work.

Hilliard's prints were all hung just below eye level so I purposefully chose to hang one set below and the other set above eye-line.

As I was unsure how the prints would look hung on the wall I also created a video projection of the images. I think as part of an exhibition I actually preferred the video as it moved so quickly it took away from the idea of these being body parts and made them un-identifiable objects. I found people spent a lot longer viewing the video work for this reason that it took much longer to analyse what they were seeing. I think this realisation could be key to future works going back to looking at the relationship between audience and artwork/artist.

This is a phone camera recording of my video piece, not the actual recording. I tried it in various places around the gallery on different back drops and at different heights to see what worked the best.

Below are a few images I took on the day of the exhibition. I first focused on the original prints and noticed it was really interesting how it captured reflections of people in the gallery - this relationship between artwork and audience I find interesting and might be something to look at again in future: