We're pleased to share that Ben Gooding from Saturation Point, 'a curatorial and editorial project for systems, non-objective and reductive artists working in the UK', recently interviewed Anna Mossman ahead of 'Lines of Empathy', the current exhibition at CLOSE in which Mossman's work features, alongside 16 of her contemporaries.
Start reading an excerpt below - you can read the full interview with a selection of Mossman's stunning works by heading to the Saturation Point website HERE
BG
Anna, I first encountered your work some years ago. At the time you were making extraordinary line drawings that were exposed photographically to make a negative image of the original drawing. I think these works pose a number of interesting questions. Let's begin by talking about the dynamic between the drawing and the negative.
If the photographic negative constitutes the ‘final’ work, does that render the original drawing redundant, in the same way that a mould is discarded once a cast is set?
AM
The term ’drawing’ suggests an element of contingency, drawing often being used as a preparation for something else, a way of forming thoughts, planning, communicating an idea. If, as in the case of these works, a drawing is produced solely to be photographed, it may be seen simply as an aid to another, finished form, or alternatively the opposite, as an ‘original’ purporting to be the main event, which is then put aside, displaced by an image that becomes the final form of the work.
Historically, in analogue photography, the negative is a means to an end, that end being a positive print. The negative itself can be seen as a representation or recording of a past event, while also pointing to a future moment (the print that will be made from it), alongside other future moments of presentation and viewing. Similarly, the line drawings can be seen as recording the time and activity that went into their making.
By presenting a negative print as the work itself, that which is seen as purely contingent process, an incomplete entity, is foregrounded, taking the viewer back to moments of darkness within the chamber of the camera body, allowing the unseen to be revealed, the (now) white lines on black being visually reminiscent of an X-
The idea of the mould and cast relates. In the drawings the generating event of their making (again, a slippery, durational situation to encompass) is now displaced by a recording that can be reproduced multiple times through printing, like any photograph, and akin to multiple casts from a mould. However, unusually, the choice of the presentation of the negative form as the final work heightens the absence of the missing drawing and situates the work in a more ambiguous position, somewhere along the way in an unfolding process. The photographer William Henry Fox Talbot coined the term the ‘pencil of nature’, the title of his 1844 book, in relation to the tracing of light in time onto light-
BG
Yes, I remember being struck by a tension between my perception of time spent, which was implicit in the nature of the drawing, and the instancy of the photographic exposure which, in material terms, constituted the thing I was experiencing in the gallery. The one thing seems to collapse into the other in this ‘unfolding process’ which I think charges the work with a certain frisson.
Conversely, the layering of process detaches these images somewhat from their origination, rendering them ambiguous, almost as if you are willing (or allowing) the true nature of their production to become lost, concealed or obscured by technical interventions. As you mention, they allude to some form of scientific imaging such as x-
Is our understanding of them actually contingent on recognising this aspect of their production? You talk about “removing focus from the ‘thing’ of the drawing”, and I wonder if these objects stand alone as detached entities that do not need to be foregrounded or defined by the physical and material properties of the drawing process? Or if you see them as inextricably bound to the act of drawing and therefore should be understood within the specific context of this tradition? Perhaps they operate more effectively as elusive forms?
AM
I agree that these works possess an immediate presence of their own, pulling the viewer into an elusive space, transforming the photographed subject radically through the negative inversion, becoming something new and separate. However, in some way they remain bound not just to a drawing, but to the mysteries of the photographic and a supposed representation of our existence in a three-
The photographic work I made leading up to these pieces used the camera for non-
In your question you allude to my ‘willing (or allowing) the true nature of their production to become lost, concealed or obscured by technical interventions’. While there is a history in my work of the hidden, the secret and the obscured, the accompanying titles and information give the viewer clues, suggesting pathways towards a further understanding of the work. However, around 2010 I began to feel that the distance created in the layering of these interventions was starting to be too great, recognising that through the evolution of the work, I was discovering a related intensity in the actual, drawn surface and the presence of the drawn object itself. The transition from analogue to digital photography and the rapid erosion of a range of photographic materials and processes in the early 2000s had actually led to these works, but by now the landscape of the photographic image was so radically transformed that this series of work gradually gave way, and my focus shifted towards the generative object.
... continue reading HERE
