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Simon Warner

 

Simon Warner,

Coming to video from a background in still photography, I was immediately thrilled by the expressive freedom offered by small digital cameras, and I put this to work in the landscape films entitled A Guide to Yorkshire Rivers. These were commissioned by The Culture Company for the group exhibition One Landscape, Many Views at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford in 2003, and take the viewer on journeys down the Aire and Ouse shot remotely from a radio-controlled model boat. (A third film of the Wharfe was made later with funding from Arts Council England, and was premiered together with the two earlier films in All Saints Church, Harewood in June 2005.)

The films all share a water-level viewpoint, together with underwater sequences where the camera passes over waterfalls and through rapids. The River Wharfe film juxtaposes this material with aerial footage that offers a remote, static and arguably aristocratic view of estate landscapes at Bolton Abbey and Harewood in contrast to the wildness and momentum of the river's passage.

It is a paradox of these films that the random camerawork is presented in a tightly edited twin or triple screen arrangement with synchronized projection to permit 'ensemble' scenes on the Ouse estuary after the rivers have joined up. I felt it important to place the screens so that the viewer's experience is of a constant interplay between the different rivers, aural as well as visual. The projector bulbs need to be of identical brightness and colour balance, and there needs to be an electronic means of starting the films simultaneously. The films have to be installed, not just set up.

This raises interesting questions about how the work can best be archived. Depositing the individual DVDs is not going to provide the experience of watching the simultaneous flow of 3 rivers, and a recorded film-of-the-films is going to produce a degraded document. As it happens, the production of the river films was well documented by artexchanges in Bradford, and I have the opportunity to provide documentary video, still photographs, diaries and written evaluation alongside the films themselves. Given the practical difficulties of shooting (I lost 2 camcorders down weirs and was put under great pressure to take swimming lessons) this material is particularly valuable,.. and perhaps compensates for the fact that the only way to fully experience the work is to see it in a gallery.

The Strid at Bolton Abbey on the Wharfe (from A Guide to Yorkshire Rivers), 2004, DV

Simon Warner's landscape photography exhibitions include High Tide, a comparison of threatened regions bordering the Humber and Rhine estuaries (The Deep, Hull plus tour 2004) and Airedale - A Changing Landscape (Cliffe Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Keighley, plus tour, 1998-1999).

In addition to A Guide to Yorkshire Rivers discussed here, Simon has created two other video installations. Leaving Home (Bronte Parsonage Museum, 2005) explored the role of Haworth parsonage in helping to form the Bronte children's imagination. Follow a Shadow (Impressions Gallery, 2003) looked at missing links between silhouette portraiture and early photography.