Project Description

One Year is a project through which it is intended to construct a daily photographic record of a single view: the view from the artist’s study window at around 8.00a.m. each day when he sits down to work.  One Year will annotate each picture with a note of the weather for that morning and the morning’s main news headline from the BBC News site.  In addition, there will be a note taking a key sentence or two from the artist’s daily journal.

 

Artist Statement

… “natural history” has no actual existence other than through the process of human history, the only part which recaptures this historical totality, like the modern telescope whose sight captures, in time, the retreat of nebulae at the periphery of the universe.

Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle

 

The purpose of this project is to explore continuity and change.  Over the course of a year, I will build up a daily visual record of the same view.  Despite my best efforts, though, I will not be able to replicate the ‘same’ view each day: it is subject to changes in the environment, such as the weather or the time the sun rises.  But it is also affected by changes caused by me, the observer.  For instance, my feelings that morning may change the way I hold the camera or, inadvertently, the image may show my breath on the glass from getting too close to the window.

Looking out at the view on this, the first morning of One Year, I see a scene comprising sky, trees and rooftops.  I don’t see much evidence of human activity just yet, but that may come later in the year when the leaf cover begins to thin out.  Being on a flight path, we also see the odd vapour trail or aeroplane light in the sky too.

Some of the changes that will become evident will be pretty obvious, such as the seasons.  Other changes will be more subtle.  My daily notes will give some insight into what is going on inside my head that morning, from my journal entry, and there will also be a record of what is happening in the world in general, from the news headline.

But the ‘view’ I am recording in One Year is not neutral, it is selected and framed by me.  Similarly, my journal extracts are selected from a much larger body of work; it is the ‘insight’ into my thinking that I choose to present.  Even the ‘news headline’ cannot be regarded as neutral, for it is subject to BBC editorial bias.

It is, rather, an inquiry undertaken in order to systematically ‘feel out’ the presence of my subject matter as it brushes against the consciousness.

Nick Papadimitriou – Scarp

But there is a third party in the One Year process, one that is outside of my control. That person is you, the reader of this blog, the interested observer of the project.  I want people to bring their own interpretations, views and insights to this project: what do you see when you look at the pictures?  All comments received will be reproduced in my weekly project reports.

 

September 20^th 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Sunny intervals
• Cyber –blackmailers ‘abuse hundreds’
• I found the students’ seminar discussion more helpful and refreshing than when a group of academics discussed the same poem earlier

September 21^st 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Light cloud
• People earning £60,000 ‘not rich’
• To edit is to deconstruct. Put every word under the spotlight and make it account for itself

September 22^nd 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Sunny intervals
• Kenya hostages trapped in standoff
• There is a point where music, writing and visual art coalesce.  Perhaps this coalescence reached its apotheosis in the album cover art of the 1970s!

September 23^rd 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Sunny intervals
• Gunfire at Kenya shopping complex
• No one seems to love living poets.  OK, Roger McGough and Ian MacMillan might be the exceptions

September 24^th 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Sunny intervals
• Kenyan forces comb Westgate site
• Autumn as a metaphor for the approach of old age, that’s a bit of a cliché, isn’t it?

September 25^th 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Mist
• Miliband hits back at energy firms
• I prefer to distil rather than expand.  The American poet, Lorine Niedecker, said her job was ‘condensing’

September 26^th 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Thick cloud
• MPs attack rural broadband rollout
• What is it with TV dramas that, when they stretch out the original successful concept into a longer series, they seem to lose all the initial freshness and become hackneyed and stylised?