Island

This work extends my engagement with site into a geo-political context, and is the outcome of an intensive exploration alongside fellow artists, of notions about international travel, translocation and exchange.

“Island” is an architecturally-scaled, digitally-manipulated photographic image, developed specifically for the geo-political and environmental context of its exhibition site. The work utilises and conflates related iconographies across different cultural forms and levels - from historical genres of painting, especially epic landscape, through photography and cinema, to advertising and lifestyle imagery. It calls on literary and historical ideas of travel, journey and voyage, particularly the Romantic tradition of seafaring, the idealised conception of the ‘desert island’ and the epic ocean voyage as metaphorical ciphers for aspects of the human condition (Melville, Conrad, Golding).

The work deploys photographic imagery on a cinematic scale, and utilises digital manipulation to propose impossible scenarios, setting up a tension between representation and apparent actuality, vision and experience. It relates to the photographic work of Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Sharon Ya’ari and Ori Gersht, and the film work of Tacita Dean and Doug Aitken.

It develops the potential of imagery as spatial experience - as well as illusion - using direct corporeal engagement with perspective, scale and sculptural form. The image becomes a physical container of its own illusion, one that allows the enormity of the ocean to become encircled by its own shore: The infinite to become an island, bound by a strip of land.

The work tested the limits of what is possible in large-format digital image manipulation and output for the individual artist. I used the infinite canvas capabilities of photo manipulation software to push the boundaries of high-resolution digital print for this installation of experientially-scaled images of up to 5 metres by 10 metres.

• http://www.csm.arts.ac.uk/51610.htm