I felt a connection with this week’s visiting artist, Johanna Love. She remediates photographs and videos of car journeys.

I often make videos of car journeys, recreating those of my childhood when I sat in the back seat watching the passing landscape. My latest one was In A Flash.

The year before last, on the taxi ride from the airport to the centre of Vienna, the flat landscape gradually gave way to a looming mass of industrial buildings belching gases into the atmosphere: the scene took my breath away – it felt so out of place, intimidating, shocking. The area is called Schwechat, and is home to one of Europe’s largest inland refineries owned by OMV. In Spring last year it began producing green hydrogen, currently at a rate of up to 1,500 metric tonnes per year making an annual saving in CO2 emissions of 15,000 metric tonnes. I was back in Vienna a couple of months ago and I managed to video it from the City Airport Train.

https://youtu.be/6ZZ6BF5HOic?si=U0AiQS7Nfva_U3LI

I applied a neon filter to the first section to reflect my initial reaction of disbelief, slowly moving through monotone to reality. I particularly like the moments of transition, the overlay and monotone effect on the trees and the chimney stacks. Screenshots reveal moments when the image is neither one thing or another; moments of transience and liminality.

I’m intrigued by those moments. They inherently represent change, the process and becoming: they are what was once, what is now and what is to become. Becoming is fundamentally a state of liminality.