Lucid and Passive - TRONDHEIM LKV Residency

A residency at Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder Trondheim, offering a blissful experiment for 6 weeks on the second floor of Mellomveien St - “the middle way”.

It was a time to consolidate a 7 year practice of light drawing, spatial inhabitation and interaction to see what the future of it could be. The answer was: its endless. A human experiences a place/event for the first time and responds with movement drawing. A collection of 12 light investigations looking at social behaviour, everyday activity, mortal pathways becoming transcendent and existing in multidimensional aspects. The ‘light investigations’ are a collection of performative, conceptual-sensorial phenomena drawn by hand, composited with other surfaces and materials in video that become apparent through the way light hits them. Norwegian winter light providing 6-8 hours each day of perfect, low contrast semi-illumination. 

Relatively trivial animations come from using urban materials compared to natural materials, for example when animating isolated, industrial objects because it can’t avoid the connoitation of industry and a type of manufacturing process, urban objects aren’t seen as pure form with large abstract potential. Minimalism being the result of modernism, living amongst the comfort of functional urban systems… it seems needless to make animations from these forms because it mostly refers to the industry which created it. To de-functionize an object gives it some potential for animation, so often that was my aim. In contrast, photographing natural forms offer an understanding of the systems which operate on multiple levels - chemical, physically unique, organic, decompositional and part of a life cycle. Maybe this is the key in the search for animation material.

https://vimeo.com/channels/samueljames/783322299