For some reason I have always been a bad still photographer, Jacqueline Riva who teaches Media, uses my photographs on the first day of teaching first year photography. They are used as what not to do, my brother as Father Christmas with his arm around my mother-in-law with kids with heads cut off, flash flare, there is a sudden lapse of continuity and concentration at the moment of capture, a kind of fear or blindness.

Using a hand held video cameras pretty much the same with infuriating results, But once you put the camera down on the table, the ground or a tripod a whole different set of possibilities begin. Using a still camera as proscenium, there is really no capture and you can present to the camera. (and watch it back)

Working with groups this is a particularly exciting as a way of representing the groups.

All of the videos I’ve been involved with have been made as A Constructed World, are largely authorless, and made with Jacqueline Riva, friends, children, social workers and therapists, disadvantaged, challenged, talented and others. This medium ha its own lustre and doesn’t know any discrimination. Some people look fantastic.

In fact I find people look spiritual or in grace or blessed or glowing in video. Given that I have worked for a long time in painting, I think nearly all the figures in video look better than nearly all the figures in my paintings; somehow more sweet, more ephemeral, more there more desirable. Recently we have been making a much larger or longer video work in the Whipstick forest near Bendigo. And the people do look very beautiful equally strange is that the landscape looks like shit, flat, too integrated and pictured not at all like landscape, with people the cheap camera makes the best image unaided-with landscape you have to imagine all technical additions lights, exposures............

Even the most scrawled picture of a leaf, or horizon line seems to say more about being there, which, I guess is what interests me most. So as with painting you learn about the world as you witness what can’t be represented, like that its hot, dusty, humid need devices to signify the don’t show up in capture. Nevertheless it is fast, about presence, fun, user friendly, largely authorless, cheap and rich.

The first video we made was at the invitation of Kim Machan for ArtRage for the ABC and I thank her for that.

We couldn’t be here tonight because I hope we’re showing Scenes from the Whipstick forest in new places. We were keen to be involved and can because of this medium we are talking about.

There are two short pieces we wish to show the first is by Crack of Noon and the second by Think Local/Act Global Troupe.

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