Artists Daniel & Clara discuss working in different media, the uncanny portrayal of lived experience, and the impact of neolithic site of Avebury on their practice.
by Ben Nicholson
Image courtesy of the artists.
Often describing themselves as two people but one artist, duo Daniel & Clara have been creating together since meeting in 2010. Since that time, they have made an array of works in a variety of forms across moving image, photography, and the written word – with a particular interest of recent works being the complicated and sometimes uneasy relationship between humanity and the natural world. Their work has shown from Southend to Tokyo, from Rio to Norwich – as well as through the letterboxes of curious subscribers across the land (including our ed.!).
On the occasion of a joint exhibition called I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat, organized in collaboration with Adonia Bouchehri, Edwin Rostron and Duncan Poulton, ALT/KINO sat down with Daniel & Clara to discuss his work.
ALT/KINO: I wanted to begin by asking you about the origins of the exhibition and the impetus that you've all felt to - as it's partly been framed - expand beyond the screen. So, what was the general idea with I'm Here But I'm Not a Cat and what it is that you, in particular, hope to get out of it.
Daniel & Clara: We met Adonia, Edwin, and Duncan at the Moving Image Salon, which was an event we started in London in 2019 showing artist moving image and experimental film. Then when in that weird spring of 2020, we were all confined to our homes, like everyone else, zoom became the primary way we stayed connected. So, we started having regular get-togethers with fellow artists to share what we were working on and to discuss our creative explorations and through these conversations, we discovered that even though we were all working in different ways, with different media and aesthetics, there were lots of interesting underlying threads that connected our work.
So, we started digging into these connections and thought that it would be really interesting to extend these conversations into a group exhibition. We are all artists who have a strong background in moving image and one of the other key things that was coming up for us all was this desire to start making more installation work, more sculptural work, and physical things that exist outside of the screen. Because of the lockdowns our time spent on screens was intensified so this was definitely a factor, but we’d all been moving towards making non-screen work anyway, the lockdown months were a kind of tipping point that helped us move into a new phase of our work.
A/K: How does that transition to more physical media feel in comparison to making your screen work? I guess I'm wondering what the differences are in terms of what you get out of the experience of constructing that work in this newer context.
D&C: Our work is often about creating experiences to be present and become conscious of being here in this moment, both for us as the makers but also for the viewer. This has always been there in our films and when we look back at them now, we can see that they were, in many ways, always dealing with physicality – images and sounds that cause physical sensations in the viewer, images that want to break free from the screen. We started working together in 2010 but our work only began to escape the frame in 2016, at first with expanded cinema performances, then in 2018 with mail art, and then the polaroids and photographs. This year we’ve started to make sculptural works too.
Visiting Avebury stone circle for the first time was a key moment in our understanding of how to move from immaterial art to art objects. What we got from Avebury is that it works like a film, it is not just a thing, it is an experience that unfolds in time. Coming from a moving image background, time and narrative are central to our thinking so our non-screen works also carry these. Our mail art projects for example exist in series that take place over a year, each one consisting of 12 letters sent monthly. What we like about them is that they are these physical objects that come from our hands directly to yours and they create a narrative experience that you participate in, they become a part of your life – entering your personal space and inner world.
The polaroids also work with time and space in a fascinating way, they are images that are also objects that materialise in the place where the photo is taken.
Image courtesy of the artists.
A/K: Yeah, that's a fascinating aspect of landscape Polaroid photography, in particular, isn't it. It's not just a picture of a place, it's also a picture that is of that place. It somehow makes the object and the image connected in more than a physical sense. It works both ways at the same time.
D&C: Polaroids are magical objects that physically appear moments after you have taken them, they don’t have the instantaneous nature of digital pictures, they have a delayed reaction, the image manifests like an echo. As the images emerge from the flat blue field, the moment of the shutter click recedes away from us in time – in this sense polaroids are motion pictures, they make us aware of the passing of time.
They are also interesting because they are unique objects. Digital pictures exist in an ethereal zone and can be duplicated hundreds or thousands of times, but polaroids are unique beings, they live in the hands, and they really do live, the chemical process of life forms before our eyes.
The process is so mysterious, we know in theory how the chemistry works but it’s beyond our comprehension of that explanation. This is something that is of essential interest to us, this idea of an unknowable mystery. We are drawn to things we can’t understand, like the great prehistoric man-made Silbury Hill. We don’t know why Silbury Hill was built. We know that it was created over four thousand years ago, but we don’t really know why it was made and how it was used. We love that we’ll never know, it just sits there through time as this impressive presence working on us, burrowing into our imaginations.
There’s so much in life that we don’t understand – we all go around thinking we’ve got the answers, that we know how things work, but actually most things are out of our grasp. As a project, our whole body of work – not just the Avebury project, but everything we do – is about that experience of edging up to the precipice of knowing and peering over the edge and saying: ‘Wow. We exist.
What a miracle. It’s terrifying and beautiful and amazing.’
A/K: One of the things I wanted to ask you about was the way that you convey experience - and what you just described then that terror and wonder feels very pertinent to that part of the conversation. There's a sense of unease that permeates your work and it often feels bound up in this subjective experiential mode which, I suppose, comes through in things like your letters as well as moving image stuff. I wondered what the process is like for you both in trying to construct these experiences for others that are - to me at least - so obviously internal, in the first instance, for yourselves.
D&C: We are interested in the nature of reality and how we make sense of our existence, how we organise the chaotic material of our lives into meanings – in our work this plays out as an investigation into the subjective experience, using ourselves as human barometers responding to the world. The work though isn’t really about us – what those personal experiences become is the material for an experience for the viewer. We are not interested in telling anyone what to think or feel but to create an experience for them to become conscious of the layers of their own thoughts and feelings.
This approach has no doubt come about due to us both being quite introvert and finding the world quite difficult at times; life is very stimulating and overwhelming and we’re very sensitive and easily knocked off balance. So, we’re always grappling with how we can orientate ourselves in the world and function vaguely like normal human beings.
The zone of our work is a place where the inner and outer worlds collide, it’s a place of uncertainty, at times unease, where cause and effect can become dislocated, and the rules of reality get a little shaky. This is because we are paying attention to the subtle shifts in our thoughts and feelings, realising that reality isn’t a fixed thing – it’s a belief system that we are all participating in and constructing.
A/K: It's really interesting to me that you're able to carry the kinds of dissonances you're talking about - the unease and the uncanniness - over from your video work to other work, like letters. The sensations you create feel so rooted in the structures of the moving image. Does it feel different to try to channel that into different kinds of work?
D&C: Cinema is our first language, but the performances, photography, letters, and sculptures that we’re now making – all of that is probably still cinema. It is like there are cracks in the fabric of our cinematic universe and it is leaking radiation out into the world and infecting everything we do.
We always had this idea that the way a film works is that we project it onto the screen, then it projects itself into the mind of the viewer, then the viewer projects themselves back onto the screen. It’s a whole relationship that’s going on; it’s not just about the film, it’s what you bring to it – your thoughts, your feelings, your family history, your cultural baggage. That all comes with you when you watch a film or when you encounter a work of art. We can never escape the limits of our subjective experience. So rather than fight that, with our films we wanted to create a space to encounter all of this – we don’t make work with a message or rigid meaning but think of films as being like a landscape. A landscape doesn’t tell you what to think or feel, but it is a very specific thing, it has parameters – there are things that it is and that it’s not – but how you interpret and react to it, emotionally and intellectually, is totally subjective. We really want to make work that does the same thing; very specific but very open. It’s like a space where you encounter something beyond yourself in order to confront yourself.
Image courtesy of the artists.
A/K: Ok, and so to segue seamlessly to the work you're showing in the exhibition: Avebury - which you've mentioned a couple of times previously - was a landscape that had a profound effect on you both and your work. Can you speak a little about the project in general?
D&C: We’re showing a few pieces from an ongoing body of work we call Avebury Imaginary. The first piece we made was a feature film called Notes From A Journey, which will be screening at Close-Up cinema to accompany the exhibition. The film resulted from that first visit to Avebury – we’d been travelling around the country for a couple of weeks to show our work and on the last day of the trip we visited the stones. We were in a particular moment in our lives then, we had been living abroad for a few years but felt very isolated and unsure about where we were supposed to be, about our place in the world. The work we had been making until then was very much looking inward and existed completely in an inner zone. We were not prepared for what we encountered at Avebury and we feel it’s not really something that can be put into words, you have to experience it – but what it felt like was that we suddenly found ourselves in this real, physical place that had been there for thousands of years, and it felt like an externalisation of some inner imaginary zone, like it had just fallen out of our heads into the landscape. We felt instantly the desire to move back to the UK and make work about the British landscape.
So, the whole experience was profound but very fleeting, it was almost as if we didn’t quite put our feet on the ground. The film explores this feeling of encountering something that you can’t quite grasp, the ephemerality of experiences, how they linger somewhere within you but are essentially insubstantial. In the film, we used various visual and sound techniques that disrupt linearity, causality, and clarity; inviting the viewer instead to question how they put this sensory information together to make sense of themselves and the world around them. It became not just a film about a journey but a film that is a journey in itself – a first person encounter with the mysterious, both ancient and modern.
We realise that we make a lot of work that is, in a sense, reaching back to the past, or in a dialogue with things that have happened a long time ago. But we’re not really past-oriented people; we’re interested in the fact that the past is what’s creating the present and is what’s leading on to the future. Avebury is a living landscape – if it has meaning for us now, it’s a thing of now.
A/K: I love that observation about the past creating the present. I feel as though places like Avebury seem, in some ways, to hold onto their own history within the physical space. If you go and walk the route that somebody famously walked, you feel like you're walking in their footsteps. For somewhere like Avebury there are, of course, thousands upon thousands of years of those footsteps, and if you want to be attuned to it, they can radiate that history.
D&C: Yes, exactly. And after we finished the film, we started researching more about the history of Avebury and discovered the significance it has had for so many artists, like Paul Nash, John Piper, Derek Jarman, Bruce Lacey and more. We were surprised to discover that many of them had not only made work in response to it but that their encounters with it had also marked significant turning points in their art and life.
So, the works that followed Notes From A Journey all deal in some way with the significant impact that this place has had on us and going over the experiences in an attempt to make sense of them. Revisiting and repetition became a recurring motif, also questioning our memories. The more we engaged with this subject, the more the images became things in themselves, disorientating markers that no longer refer to an original experience or place, but to the place as it exists in our imagination.
The latest piece we made is showing for the first time in this show, and it was not made in Avebury but from memories of our previous visits. We created a model of the stone circle and Silbury Hill completely from memory, not looking at photos or maps but trying to mentally retrace our steps and create a representation of the place in 3D. We used the techniques of railway model makers and tabletop gamers, with fake grass, foam and stones made from clay – it’s a work with the hobbyist aesthetic, it speaks of obsession and how this project is not really just dealing with the place but with the idea of the place, what it is as a personal symbol of some kind of psychological centre. The piece is called Avebury Complex, which is a term that is often used to refer to the series of ancient monuments in that area, but we’re interested in the double meaning of “complex” as being both a related group of ancient sites and also in the psychoanalytical sense: ‘a related group of repressed or partly repressed emotionally significant ideas which cause psychic conflict leading to abnormal mental states or behaviour.’
I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat runs from 22 Sep - 1 Oct at SET Kensington.
Screenings of moving image work by the artists take place at Close-Up Film Centre on 23 September.
We have also conducted interviews with Adonia Bouchehri, Duncan Poulton, and Edwin Rostron.