Floral-tastic

by Janie Nicoll, 27 Jul 2008

It’s the calm before the storm, as tomorrow we start to install the Garlands exhibition and it’s a bit like any sport, you have to “get into the zone”..
I seem to oscillate between mild panic and refusing to feel flustered, although maybe this is actually being “in denial”. The trouble with working with Installation is that you can never make definite decisions about the work until you actually get into the space and start to work with it. Then you can assess the variables that you are dealing with. Its ultimately quite a stressful way of working and its at times like these that I wish I had stuck with painting on canvas, then at least the majority of the formal decisions are already made and pretty much all that’s left is the layout of the hang. I just keep telling myself that I can get a lot done in 10 days, as often I have made installations in 2 or 3 days or less and that’s been in a different city or country even. So time to get things in perspective……

Another stress is my decision to use old equipment and to “return” to using slides and slide projectors. It felt good manually loading a roll of slide film into my old SLR camera until I ran into technical trouble, as the shutter was no longer working. Again something did feel good about that sense of anticipation dropping the films off to get them developed and having to wait til the next day to collect them, not knowing if they would be reasonable pictures or not. The digital age has made it all so thoroughly instant and definitely easier and in a way it felt good, almost wholesome, to be returning to the old familiar.

Again the idea of using old equipment in the form of slide projectors initially seemed like a good idea for various reasons, as I presumed that most galleries, and institutions would possess these pieces of equipment that have only recently been superceded by Powerpoint and data projectors. Unfortunately it has been far harder to round up the type that I need (that rotate automatically), so I am having to modify my original idea, and there’s the added stress that the ones I do have may or may not survive a month of constant use.. There is something marvelously reassuring about the sound of the slides clunking up and down, in and out of position as they plod round the carousel. The intensity of the projected colour is lovely, when compared to the pixellated digital blobs that you often get from projected video however, I can understand why people and technology have moved on.

So over and above all the practical and technical issues there also the anxiety about the content, will it all be too morbid, too sentimental, too obvious, too twee ….etc etc

I was reading the catalogue for “Greyscale /CMYK” an exhibition at the Tramway in 2002, with an introduction by Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt and she quoted from Dave Batchelor’s book “Chromophobia” written in 2000; where he discusses the innate prejudice towards monochromatic works, to the detriment of colour.

”there remains a belief, often unspoken perhaps but equally often unquestioned that seriousness in art and culture is a black and white issue, that depth is only measured in shades of grey”.

I look back over the last few years since that show and there seems to have been a lot of colour since then. The Art pendulum swings one way and then the other; for every action, a reaction. Oh well, time for some more colour, as long as the equipment doesn’t let me down anyway…… we shall see…..

Anyone reading this with an automatic rotary slide projector they don’t need over the next few weeks please get in touch !! to janienicoll@yahoo.co.uk