Still Nothing Moves You
Still Nothing Moves You showcases the work of two artists, Sam Lloyd and Ronnie Loten. Both are currently completing an MA in Photography at the University of Portsmouth.
These two practitioners encompass widely disparate and seemingly incompatible areas of interest, from the familial impact on the formation of the individual to humankind's complex relationship with the natural world. What unites them, is a shared sense of curiosity and enquiry sought through an extensive and intensive process of research and of making.
One way to navigate such art practice is to consider the act of making as a form of engagement with the world and to accept that this, in itself, is capable of producing distinct and valuable forms of knowledge. The photograph in this context can be best considered as one component in this form of engagement, rather than as a document (an arbiter of truth) or as a picture (an aesthetic image). Every photograph is, of course, both document and picture, but to see photography only in these terms is all too prevalent and all too limiting. Here, by contrast, the photograph is set to work, not just as a means to explore and navigate the thing in question but also as a thing in question.
Image © Sam Lloyd
Barbara Bolt, in her excellent essay The Magic is in Handling, borrows the term "originary" from Emmanuel Levinas to describe a way of understanding, produced through art practice, that derives from, or in, the thing in question. She draws on Heidegger's Being and Time to further demonstrate the importance of this type of understanding. "Heidegger argues that we do not come to know the world theoretically through contemplative knowledge in the first instance. Rather we come to know the world theoretically only after we have come to understand it through handling. Thus the new can be seen to emerge in the involvement with materials, methods, tools and ideas of practice." (Bolt 2007: 30)
The process of making is, therefore, not only important but is the thing itself.
Sam Lloyd's practice involves an ongoing and obsessive quest to navigate, and work with, the intertwining of his own concern with the environment and ecology, his love of photography and walking, and his literary interests. The tree stump becomes a repeated motif and the use of analogue darkroom and Polaroid processes, the tools of engagement; the cut trees and the photographic aberrations somehow mirroring each other in their metaphorical significance. The thing itself is in both.
Equally obsessive, Ronnie Loten takes the idea of process even further. Taking, as a starting point, his own relationship with his father, Ronnie works through his own emotional states, accessing these through performative and ritualistic forms of clay sculpture. The sculpture itself is absent, yet we can hear the process, recorded onto an old cassette recorder, and we can see the "documentation" of the sculptural surface. This absence is mirrored in the gaps depicted, both in these surfaces and in the appropriated fragment from Ronnie's own family album.
