Overlay | Kate McCalmont-Woods

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.

I decided to try out the ‘map’ drawing using oil paints. I liked the combination of pencil and oil paint in As I Was Going To St Ives and so I drew the grid lines on some oil paper – I was limited to A3. I put the paper on the floor and lightly rubbed over the tiles which created an interesting texture. Then I did the figures and the automatic drawing, just as before.

I’ve decided that I really enjoy making the lines and marking the intersections. My brain must truly have become disconnected from the process because, for some inexplicable reason, I thought that a quick spray of fixative would be sufficient before I applied the oil paints. Oh, how wrong I was. The solvent and graphite mixed really well – that’s the positive I’m taking from this! It needs to be the other way round, possibly, maybe, or maybe not. But time to stop and give up for the day, but not before I salvage something from the process. I’ve been thinking as I’ve been experimenting that the cutouts look really interesting in themselves, so I cut out the figures from the latest effort and did a bit of arranging on a spare sheet of paper. Interesting, particularly the figures in transparent film…