Wandering Shards 

2015 – 16

This film/essay* takes as its point of reference the foreshore of the River Thames at Greenwich reflecting upon the transformative potential of ‘waste’ material (bone) associated with the site. Through a phenomenological engagement with the life of the river, things with past origins can be understood not as a repository of secrets to be unearthed but as material energies exercising power in the present, a dynamic of forces and flows connected with living flesh and bone, photography and architecture. These material energies: organisms; minerals; fluid currents and digital technology combine to constitute a relational assemblage. The writing of the text itself acts to become a temporary ‘meeting place’, as a durational practice of place which asks not only how we are situated with regard to the past, but also how we are immersed in an ongoing present. 

*The work exists as a photo essay and a performed reading with moving image.

Text extract

‘…Standing on the shore on the verge of the New Year, the sun even at midday burns low in the sky. Today, I am frozen to the bone. The river bones as usual are here, swept into new configurations. I watch the pull of the tide and listen to the rushing of wind, the threshing of Thames Clipper and drone of aeroplane, and the distant grind of the capital at work.

A glowing orange bobs past. The tide is on the turn as the spinning earth enters the new phase of its orbit, carrying our bones once more towards the warmth of the sun. The cyclical diurnal rhythm of repetition and return provides a certain reassurance to existence and the shuttling rhythm of the bones back and forth both confirms this reassurance and disturbs it, for their indexical link to mortality is a reminder of the limitations of individual human historical time…’

Moving image stills (details)

Links

‘Spolia, Relic, Data’, The British School at Rome,Italy,2015.

‘Wandering Shards: Image as Meeting Place.’ Journal of Visual Art Practice, 15 (2-3). ISSN 1470-2029

‘Wandering Shards.’ Philosophy of Photography 5, 2. (146-157) 2014. ISSN 2040-3682

https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/view/creators/Trangmar=3ASusan=3A=3A.html