A number of my photographic works on the subject of salt are included in the beautiful artist book ‘Beneath the Salt’ edited by Marianne Bjørnmyr & Dan Mariner.Read More
EXHIBITION: SPECTRAL ECOLOGIES
Spectral Ecologies
Artists: Sam Nightingale and Polly Stanton
April to 18 June 2017
Mildura Arts Centre, Australia
Spectral Ecologies is an exhibition of photography, sound and video that explores the landscape of the Mallee through the idea of the “cinematic”, asking how does cinema create a particular way of seeing? The artists, Sam Nightingale and Polly Stanton, take up this question by exploring the different ways that technologies enable us to see and to experience the landscape of the Mallee, the way specific narratives frame what we see, and the way that the land creates its own images. Working through the tracks and traces of the route taken by an early traveling picture show and responding to the inherent image-making capacity of the landscape, Nightingale and Stanton creatively map and imagine the Mallee…Read More
El Paso
I spent some time in El Paso a couple of years ago. It was clear to see how entwined it is culturally, socially and economically with the Mexican city of Juárez which sits just across the Rio Grande. A wall between these two cities will be destructive and divisive on so many levels. Read More
Preservation and Mutability: salt and the archive
I have been thinking about salt a lot recently. Maybe a strange way to start a blog for the TIHR Archive Project but actually there are many connections between the qualities of salt and the archive.
As an artist I often have the opportunity to put together concepts that at first appear disconnected. Salt and archival practices are a reoccurring feature of Spectral Ecologies, a practice-based research project I am working on that focuses on the Mallee, a geographically and historically complex region of southern Australia. As part of the project, I visited Lake Tyrrell, a salt lake, where I spent time thinking about the relationship between salt and archives, realising that not only are salt and the archive both agents of preservation but they are equally agents of change and transformation.Read More
PRACTISING DEEP TIME RESIDENCY
TimeSpan, Helmsdale, Far North Scotland
November 2016
TimeSpan’s Residency Focus: Deep Time moves beyond a human scale, beyond language, beyond fact. In Scotland’s Far North it can be seen in the geological and the nuclear: the peat bogs of the Flow country and the nuclear site of Dounreay. A consideration of deep time also suggests possible methodologies for practice: excavation, speculation. Read More