Exposures 1996-8

Exposures was a commission to make a work in a working coal mine, Bilsthorpe Colliery in Nottinghamshire before it closed down. The resulting time based projection installation is composed of two kinds of photographic exposures: deep perspective images of the architectural space of the mine and close up exposures of miners in movement at work. The projections dissolve in and out of one another, animated by a random dissolve programme. They appear for varying lengths of time, making a series of unpredictable events of exposure which echo and recur. The extraction of coal (a fossil fuel) through the expenditure of human energy to create electrical energy for light is fundamental to the work. The projection installation itself is powered by the consumption of electrical energy, creating a circuit of energy production and consumption. Once the mine was closed down, the mine 'galleries' closed in upon themselves under pressure of gravity and no longer exist as concrete architectural spaces. An Angel RowGallery and Nottingham City Council commission.

‘…In the recent work of Susan Trangmar, light is presented as material and is made to be substantial. The sheer presence of light is manifested as energy in space and time. A very material situation is encountered, the hum and whirr of  slide projectors, the trailing cables which draw in the power for conversion into light. The projectors within the space, as sources of emitted light, form a fixed constellation…An interconnected network of energy centres is realized. Once established, this network provides the pulse for the work, the time of the work is also its space and energy’

John Penny ‘Exposures' European Photography no 60 1996