Translation.

 

Translation.

 

‘We must dream of promised lands and

fields

That never fade in season

 

As we move towards no end we learn to

die…’

 

These lines from Killing Joke’s “Love Like Blood” come from the paper insert of a cassette of their album Night Time. I have always suspected that this cassette, bought in South East London in the early 1990’s, was a bootleg. The sound quality is terrible; there is a long, initial silence that resembles the beginning of a vinyl recording. I kept it purely for “Love Like Blood.” The thing is, in the 80’s and early 90’s, we were bootlegging all the time, performing magical transfers of music from one media into another. It was a secret code; if someone liked you, they would offer to do you a cassette of their Zodiac Mindwarp album or introduce you to Dub Reggae by giving you a mix tape.

My sister and I had a tacit agreement regarding music. Often, we hated each other’s taste in music. She thought my Goth tastes were cheesy. I found her love of Sonic Youth and Nick Cave incomprehensible. At certain points our tastes converged, we both loved John Peel and watched The Old Grey Whistle Test and The Tube together. To prevent “appropriation,” i.e. stealing each other’s cassettes or vinyl, producing a copy was the answer. This did not work with clothes or shoes, which either got destroyed in the fight over ownership or mysteriously vanished; in which case there was nothing to fight over.

A lot of care and trouble went into these bootlegs. You had to judge the run in of a record and the run in of the tape and press record at exactly the right moment. If pressed too early you would get crackly silence. If pressed too late you would miss the beginning off the track. The same applied to pressing stop; too early the track was cut short, too late, excessive white noise.

The resulting tapes were fragile, temperamental things; forever getting caught, twisted or unravelling. Roadsides were adorned with reams of tape which tangled in bushes and blew in the wind like streamers. I was fascinated by this discarded tape, thrown from car windows in disgust and frustration. I wondered if visiting aliens or a future civilisation would realise that this was not just tape but a means of transmission. Something that could not be seen was encoded on it. Could they figure out how to translate tape into music? I wondered what music had been discarded that alien visitors might be subjected to; perhaps Sonic Youth or Kylie Minogue

My fascination with the magical transfer of something from one media into another probably began in childhood. I would try to figure out how a piece of vinyl with grooves in it magically produced sound. The record player had been constructed by my Dad and I asked him how it worked. All I understood from my Dad’s explanation was that a diamond tip on the needle transformed grooves into sound. I have never been technically minded, nor particularly rational. Despite my Dad’s explanations, the process remained a mystery. I concluded that my Dad was a form of wizard called a “Systems Engineer.”

The same was true for that other magical process called photography. Something out there magically transferred onto this strange, curly film. This was placed into a small canister, sent off in an envelope and returned as photographs. In order to explain this particular magic to me, my Dad showed me how a box brownie worked. Again, this process remained incomprehensible to my irrational mind. Things my Dad understands as matter of fact to me seem inherently mysterious. This applies to the most logical and rational processes which to me are neither logical nor rational. Unlike those blessed with reason, my brain is baffled by the most mundane things which I then try to figure out. This idiotic process of trying to figure something out results in something called art.

The only way I understand things is by teaching myself to do them. This can result in the development of interests and hobbies out of the blue. I find out everything possible about the subject and keep doing it until I have understood how the process works. Then I stop doing it. Whilst this is going on, the activity is obsessive and all consuming.  These activities have included playing the piano, silversmithing, drawing, oil painting, gardening and photography.

In order to understand photography, I had to start from the beginning. I had taken photographs for years; my parents having bought me an Olympus OM10 as a teenager. Despite this, I did not understand photography. I read everything I could find on historical processes, turned a room into a camera obscura and made pinhole cameras. I needed to know how to develop the images so read up on developing. I turned the cellar into a darkroom with the aid of black plastic sheets and bought all the equipment and chemicals. I obsessively made photograms and developed them. Due to my inherent irrationality and lack of precision, producing “Master of Photography” negatives and prints was out of the question. I preferred developer soup which I topped up and liked the strange blooms that appeared on the prints. Once I had managed to develop a film and print from a few medium format polaroid negatives, I decided to call it a day. My cellar is scary and the polaroid back I had been using broke.

Some may regard this behaviour as being a jack of all trades and master of none. This misses the point; I only do these things to understand something that to me is inherently mysterious and incomprehensible, not to master it.

Since then, I have been using the results of this “understand photography escapade” to create other artworks. Elements of my “understand gardening escapade” also appeared in artworks and found their way into the “understand photography escapade.” These escapades have all led to the translation of certain visual images into many different artworks.

“Translation” is perceived to be the movement, transfer or transport, performed by my artistic practice, from one artistic media into another, and from one material form into another. Rainer Guldin writes that,

‘… in the Middle Ages “translation” possessed a much wider semantic range, from which later, linguistically oriented theories of translation had to wrest their proper meaning.’

Rainer Guldin, Translation as Metaphor (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 72.

Guldin suggests that,

‘In medieval Latin, translatio meant linguistic translation, as well as symbolic, physical displacement of persons, ideas, practices and objects. Despite this semantic multiplicity, the central idea was that of movement or transfer.’

Rainer Guldin, Translation as Metaphor (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 72.

My use of the term “translation” retains this semantic multiplicity. I have now returned to drawing and aim to keep drawing as my main focus, but who knows what is round the corner. Below are some images of artwork and photographs containing elements of the gardening and photography escapades.