Summer I

7th Oct 20257th Oct 2025Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

Whilst I don’t know where the summer went, it seems that I have quite a bit to catch up on.

As is our habit, we went to the RA for the Summer Exhibition. I don’t think ‘A Die, A Log, With You’ was much missed. There was the usual mixed bag. I felt myself drawn to any pieces which bore any resemblance to maps or mapping.

I think I know what my entry next year will be, irrespective of theme.

Then we went into the Kiefer/Van Gogh exhibition. I didn’t expect to enjoy it and I’m not sure that enjoy is the right word anyway. The works are huge and for once I didn’t really even register their size, because it was inherently obvious why they were the way they were. I sat in front of the first image below (Crows) for ages. In my mind the path leading up the centre was wet and muddy, the kind on which you can’t get any traction, putting in lots of effort but slipping and sliding all over the place and getting nowhere. Despite its warm colours, it felt bleak and desolate.

The works have a three dimensional quality with Keifer’s use of straw and clay. It’s as if he is reconstructing reality on the canvas, the surface of the works offering up their own landscapes, casting their own shadows. It must have taken ages for them to dry.

In A Flash

3rd Oct 2025Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

Whenever I don’t have to drive, but am driven, I like to look out of the window at the world as it passes by, to daydream. It reminds me of my childhood and Sunday afternoon drives, safe in the car away from all the witches and ghouls which were out there in the woods, which were left behind – those were the days when you didn’t have to wear seatbelts – I was fascinated with looking out of the rear window to make sure that we weren’t being followed, to watch as we left behind.

I remember my father driving us in the darkness to catch the ferry back to England to visit my grandmothers, the bright lights of the car dashboard, of the ferry and port. The moment of held breath as we embarked, over the ramp, the car laden with all of our stuff, low to the ground. Even now I get a buzz of excitement when driving late at night and the heavy machinery rolls out onto the motorway, the flashlights, the hi vis, the noise.

Over the last year I’ve started filming the landscape as it rushes by. We went past Stonehenge on our way back from Exeter in June with all of our daughter’s stuff in the car.

The sky is more or less static and the mid ground moves a long quite slowly, with Stonehenge almost gliding across the screen. And then there is the fast moving foreground – I find the fence line and the traffic paraphernalia fascinating – the way in which the posts seem to be animated, punctuating the foreground, jumping up and down, reminding me of the graphic equalisers on my first stereo.

I wanted to create an image with less immediacy, with some distance, some sense of layering and so I experimented by filming the footage from my iPad with layered clingfilm over the screen.

I like this shortened version, I think it has more impact, or maybe it gets to the point a lot sooner – my social media shortened attention span at work.

I played around with different effects and took some random screenshots.

I like the abstract nature of some of the images, the sense of ghostly imprints, an image which is not quite there, or that was there, but has since moved on.

Sticker

1st Oct 2025Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

I brought in my one remaining pinhole camera the other day. It was really disappointing – although it had captured some good trails of the sun, it had fallen sideways (my bad) and the constant switching between really hot and cold weather recently must have caused condensation to form inside the can. It’s a shame because it seemed to me to be a good way of capturing the passage of time in a static image. Never mind, I may try again.

I’m not very techie and when I was converting the original image into black and white on my phone before I got into bed last night, I accidentally created a sticker. I’ve never really paid much attention to the white line which cuts out the sticker before, but on an abstract image it was fascinating to see where it went and what it chose to cutout. I decided to screen record the process, add some filters and play around with the replay speed.

I particularly like the one above – it reminds me of paper burning around the edges.

I used the image from What Was I Thinking? as it has both curved and straight lines amidst the multiple figures, and I was interested to see what path the line chose to follow.

Finally, I wondered what would happen if I tried an image which has a myriad of shapes within it and a white line of its own, so I used an image from Carbon Dating.

I had a great time experimenting, but when I finished an hour later my brain was still trying to process it all and thinking of how I might be able to develop it. It’s proving to be a tiring day today.