MA RESEARCH TASK: Phantasmagoria by Marina Warner

Research is a vital part of an artists practice adding depth and body to the work and connecting it to a wider context. I find that my work leads me to inquire and seek knowledge around subjects and thought processes that I might have had little understanding of, or can introduce me to an entirely new investigative direction. In the London Art Fair talk last week, ‘Creating During Crisis’, Matthew Burrows said that ‘artists are very good at being inventive in a crisis’. They understand what it is to be in the long game, to be solitary and alone, chipping away at their work. Research is one aspect of this process. It takes time to learn and absorb information, to bring this knowledge into the studio, to take risks and push the work into unfamiliar directions.

My choice of research was a section in the Introduction to Marina Warners book, Phantasmagoria. My recent work ‘2 meter ruler’ and the work proposed for Beyond the Boundaries exhibition ‘the introduction’ plays with the animation of objects, animation being the goal of bringing inanimate objects to life. This extract from Phantasmagoria introduces the subject of ‘developing tools for broadcasting its phantasms into the exterior world’. Beginning with waxworks, and the infamous magic lantern, latterly the wireless, the telephone and the television, makers and creators have played with the ‘dynamic between the seer and the seen’ conjuring ghosts and raising the dead, for many centuries. 

Animation, that is, evidence-of-life, was not really achieved until the arrival of moving pictures. Film ‘partakes of the living nature of its original, and continues to be present and animate when they are not there…’ This has led to consequences that have warped  perceptions of phenomena that have no substance, mass or gravity with things that do. ‘Physics has brought a new metaphysics into being,’ where matter has become immaterialized. This information given by Marina Warner as she introduces her book, Phantasmagoria, has the possibility of giving strength to my practice as I play with the animation of objects, light and shadow. It is vital that I continue to search for knowledge around my work and for it to give substance and context within the wider world.

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE 26 JANUARY 2021

Warner, Marina, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-first Century

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, Introduction

pgs. 9-20