Transcript of article published in Slade - a series of publication exploring the work of passed students of The Slade School of Fine Art

Issue 2 - including interviews and articles on the work of Tacita Dean, Dryden Goodwin, Douglas Gordon, Georgina Starr, Smith/Stewart

Dryden Goodwin

Interview by Aliki Braine

Given that you originally studied painting at the Slade, is there a traceable relationship between your early, serial portrait paintings and your subsequent film work? For example, one noticeable feature of your work is a fusion of still and moving images (through slow motion, repetition, etc).

There is a continuing cross-pollination underpinning my work between working in two dimensions and with time based media. As a means to further my investigations it continues to prove fruitful to work across a variety of media, for example applying notions discovered through drawing and painting to working with a camera and vice versa.

Originally it was only through drawing and painting that I explored ways of recording experiences particular to certain environments, for example airports, hospitals or cities. Heathrow (1994), the first film that I made, really evolved out of my inability, working purely in two dimensions, to capture the very particular qualities of time, duration and the emotional and practical dynamics that I experienced and I observed others encounter in the airport. Working with a time-based medium fed back, making me acutely aware that it was the qualities of duration and the relationship between images that I was particularly excited by.

When I was painting sequences of portraits from projected images at the Slade I was caught in an almost obsessive challenge, trying but inevitably struggling to replicate a precise moment. Each portrait, with its subtle differences from the last, was evidence of this failed attempt. In more recent video work, through sequencing, repetition and editing strategies that play with the motion and speed of the video image, I am attempting to expand these notions, trying to question further the role of duration and of time spent looking and recording.

Currently I'm developing a body of work that combines drawing and the moving image through the use of a laser light pen that I shine onto a subject to interfere with the moving portraits of various unknown individuals in public spaces. I am examining a sense of connection in real time that I experience between myself and the person I'm focusing on. In a way the laser itself is a drawing device.

The sounds and music in your work seem as complex and important in the work as the images, though this may not, in my experience be apparent at once. Can you say something about the soundtracks?

It has been useful to consider the difference between the role of sound and music in cinema and its potential for me in the gallery context. I want the viewer to occupy a slightly awkward mid ground fluctuating between getting caught up in the particular emotions of the imagery and soundtrack, but remaining conscious of the process of looking and listening. The soundtrack can become quite emotionally charged and set up this ambiguous reaction in the viewer, in turn alienating and involving.

With the revolving soundtracks that accompany some of my multi-screen installations (Within (1998), Wait (2000)), I hope to engender speculative readings of the images, the viewer sees the same images against different and distinct sound sections, setting up very different atmospheres. The effect is to constantly shift the relationship between the viewer and the viewed and myself as the conduit. Through the relationship of sound and image, I am ultimately attempting to extend the matrix of interpretation.

Do you distrust the visual? I ask because film and photography usually allows viewers a chance to scrutinise images at length, whereas much of your footage denies the viewers the possibility of sustained viewing (through rapid movement, blurring, acute close ups etc).

I am trying to engage the viewer in a process that fluctuates between orientation and disorientation, through various means, some of which you've mentioned. Hopefully this enables a more active involvement, opening up a distinct imaginative space for the viewer. It is the relationship between the moments of clarity and ambiguity that particularly excite me. I recognise the need for a balance between imposing and presenting, so you invite the viewer in without being too didactic.

I have in fact, through different works, set up a spectrum of ways to involve the viewer. I have made work which incorporates rapid change on every frame of the film or video and others which slow the images down to a practical standstill. These are my attempts to set up different viewing conditions. When I am making a work these particular structures emerge out of the evolving logic of each piece, hopefully the viewer becomes acclimatized to the mechanism of each work. I am interested in the apparatus of looking and how to activate the imagination, triggering thoughts and even memories.

How do you reconcile the differences between the poetic narrative and the documentary possibilities of your chosen images? I especially have in mind Ospedale, (made while you were studying at Fabrica in Treviso).

I always take a real situation as my starting point but then there is the process of intervention and manipulation of this raw material, for example this could be by digital means or by developing a particular structure, to create a kind of hyper-reality.

By extracting and isolating pockets of time from real situations I aim to go beyond a documentary aesthetic. I don't want the works to be simply an illustration of a place or experience. My real intent is to reveal what would have previously been hidden or missed, to distil the condition and the fundamental dynamics of a real place such as a hospital which is not only a physical, but also a highly emotional, environment.

Your work is often the sum of both your moving, film images and the way they are installed. Are you a sculptor? What is more important, the narrative content of your images (if they are narratives?) or their physical existence and the way they are experienced in space?

In varying ways I want to create an active tension between the viewers subjective involvement with the environments, emotional inferences and narrative strains of each piece and a simultaneous awareness of the construct, retaining some objectivity. The way I arrange the works in the gallery space can have a huge impact on this. I am conscious that the structuring and layout of the space holds the key to the way that the works are viewed and also a means to suggest the time frame that is needed for viewing. In the gallery there is always the sculptural consideration of the scale of the screens in relation to the viewer and the size of the space. What underpins my work is an attempt to give form to moments and experiences that are transient, so in a certain respect there are sculptural considerations at play at a more fundamental level.

Even within the content of some of my single and multi-screen work (Within (1998), Wait (2000), Closer (3 Screen Video Installation), (2002), I try to make physical space a malleable matter by cutting through distances using zoom devices and playing with the differences between optical proximity and spatial distance. In a more obvious way I have deployed some of the same principles in other installations, for example One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Eight, (1998) which really aim to activate the showing space in the way sculpture might. In this 16mm film loop there is the juxtaposition of the large scale projection of the jumbo jets flying overhead, counterbalanced by the minute scale of the aeroplanes on the film material itself that travels around the space in a loop. Hopefully there is an emotional impact of the different scales of these two elements, a large overpowering projection and the simultaneous, diminutive representation on the film frames.