text michelle hobby

Rooms: 1817, 1908, 2014. (1-6, ed. 15, a2), Digital c- prints

2014

My interest in photography began when looking back at my own (pre-digital) childhood photographs.  We can all relate to being a child but how do we represent childhood innocence? Indeed memory of our own childhood is an interesting proposition.  During the formative and developing years, at best we have some highlights at worst, lost time.  Innocence comes before knowledge and experience.  

In some ways Rooms is an eternal representation of childhood innocence.  It's a photomontage series of Edwardian children in an empty nineteenth century house which tells a story of absolute past.  In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes describes a moment when looking at a childhood photograph of his recently deceased mother as '... a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is a catastrophe.'  

I began this project with a search for childhood innocence.  What emerged in this series, in these rooms is a representation of innocence that is frozen, intangible and long gone. 

Book - Rooms: 1817, 1908, 2014. Texts and images, available online.

Detour - Digital c- prints

2010

This is a collection of photographs taken at the Chateau Versailles.  Like earlier works, interior surfaces are used to suggest an experience and essence of place.  This project has a relaxed feel echoing my approach, compared with the formal approach in Pilgrim Street fire Station institutional design and space.

In Detour vibrant colours, details and grand spaces offer an dramatic sensory experience of Versailles’ theatrical excess and luxury.  During the shoot I became increasingly aware and intrigued by the secret doorways and passages, focusing on the transitional and liminal spaces, the partial glimpses through a doorway, curtain and paintings.  Altogether this series is a heady, colourful and flirtatious narrative of space, drawing attention to that which cannot be seen. 

Art book - Intervals RP 384 F - 78008. Out of print.

Transmutation - Giclee prints, video installation & found object

2009

History Transforms Place

The Chief’s Series 1-4 is a series of digitally manipulated photographs (digital c-prints).  There’s intertextual references to Intersection linking the two bodies of work.  At the same time offering a window into what lies beyond the office walls.

The Chief's Office pt.5  2010.  1:1,  video installation 5min loop, online https://vimeo.com/85341315

The Original Green Wall. (giclee print).  The fire station is over seventy-five years old.  This photograph shows a photographic facsimile glued onto one of the few walls that has retained its original colour scheme, from when the building was first opened.  I created all facsimile photographs using specialist textured matte paper to enhance the illusion of the surfaces and objects photographed.

Zoned Map & Map (found object and giclee photograph).  I glued a 1:1 scale photographic facsimile of the central section of the wall mounted map over the original.  This was left in situ at the fire station for several months.  Rain continued to leaked through the cracks of the decaying building effecting both the map and my facsimile photograph.  Many of the rooms within the abandoned building are in disrepair and suffering from external water damage.  After several months I cut my facsimile photograph from the map.  The exact and original glued section remaining on the reverse pealing open.  I exhibited the original framed map along side the rain damaged facsimile.  My aim was to undo memory in a photograph.  What I achieved to a certain extent, was to 'remove' traces of the photograph. 

These works became one-off digital photographs.  When removing each facsimile photograph from the decaying building, I stripped a layer of the original surface photographed on the reverse.  Some have remnants of the original surface photographed, some a complete original layer, as in Map.  The building affected my photographs, and my process affected the building.