Elizabeth Rose
My work often explores niche pastimes, such as going to boot fairs, flower arranging classes, looking at church ruins. Activities that aren't advertised in the normal way by television or newspapers, they are things you can only do if you know about them through word of mouth or a chance encounter in the landscape. These are pastimes, or places that slip through the net of the usual dissemination of knowledge. Knowledge not passed through experts, journalists, etc but through a channel that is temporal and chance.
My interests lie in the local and community that has been put through a prism of sentimentality. It is easy to over indulge in a longing for these local activities and my work is concerned with how to resist or not the temptation to over sentimentalise the working classes. The work is often to a degree collaborative, involving the communities around me to form maps of their existence and my interaction with them. Sentimentality is a constant concern for me as I often use, 35mm photograph and 16mm film which can lend itself to being considered of time past or nostalgic. This has lead to an interest in analogue filmic mediums and their ability to suggest a of different time period. In the same way that architecture has the ability to represent values or ideals of the time it was built in photograph; film has the emotive power to confront the audience with a set of values that produces a tension when it is seen in the present.
Still #1
16mm film
