photography

Libraries Gave Us Power /  by Mark Gubb

A collaborative photographic project documenting the, over-800, libraries that have closed in the UK since 2010 (under this Tory government). I will publish a list of the libraries and their, defunct, addresses, with an invitation for anyone/everyone to photograph the buildings or sites and share them with me as part of the project, as a fully credited collaborator. These images could be a series of zines, a book, a video, an exhibition, or all of them.

Origami Extreme /  by Mark Gubb

Take a sheet of any size screw-up-able material and screw it up into a ball.

Take a photo.

Flatten it out again and trace over every fold and crease line with a fine-liner pen.

The reference photo and the lines on the piece of paper then exist as some sort of extreme (impossible?) origami proposition.

Cultural Icon Fire /  by Mark Gubb

This could be a performance, an action, a video, a photograph, or all of them.

Using a flammable liquid or gel, a large pentagram (for example) is drawn on the floor, after dark. This is then set alight.

I have also imagined this as a potential series of ‘round iconography’ burns i.e. do the same with an anarchy symbol, C.N.D., a smiley etc.

A Repeatable Action-Work /  by Mark Gubb

Every artist needs a simple action-work that they can do anywhere, anytime (for example, on arrival somewhere), which transforms a fairly modest moment into a moment of creativity, capturing something of that moment and lending it significance (even if it doesn’t really have any).

Something like:

Balling/screwing-up a blank piece of A4 paper, then photographing it in-situ.

Keeping the disposable cup from the first cup of coffee you drink in a new destination.

Sending a postcard to your dead Grandmother’s last address.

In some ways, it doesn’t really matter what the action is, it’s just a physical representation of a moment. The success of a work like this exists in the repetition. One balled-up and photographed piece of A4 is photograph of a piece of trash, whereas 100 photographs of balled-up pieces of A4 in different locations becomes a marker of time.