Isabella Streffen

THIEF (2000)

Little Pieces Of Bread Once Eaten By Starlings (2000)

Please do feel free to download these pdfs.

I mentioned earlier that I’d had a bit of a sort through of all my old things. There’s quite a quantity of works that still need digitising, but I wanted to get these two done and dusted because they were really important in the development of my practice.

Thief is an album of polaroid photographs taken around Sheffield during the winter of 1999-2000. There was a point in my practice when I felt intimidated by being a photographer – there’s still an ambivalence ten years later. This work emerged as a response to that anxiety. I tried out doing something socially unacceptable (taking photos of people’s private domestic spaces without their permission) to confront myself with some of my fears. One night, despite having carefully turned off my polaroid flash, it went off anyway, and I was chased down the street by a man in a glorified nightie wielding a saxophone.  This is far from an exhaustive selection. My night-time wanderings took place over several months, and were carefully edited into this bespoke silk-bound foiled album (made by book-binder Heather Dewick). It was certainly the work of a collector, and evolved into a sequence of pieces including Tom and I, and Private View (2001). I was fascinated by the display that people made of their living spaces, knowing that they were open to observation by the casual passer-by. Lights on, curtains open, a come-hither for the greedy of eye. Tom and I (the reference to a peeping tom made explicit) is a more substantial collection of images taken on 35mm film. What they lack compared to the seductive colour qualities of polaroid film, they make up for in sharp detail. There’s something slightly nastier about them, a little grubbier, they start to cross a line by dint of their volume and repetition. I showed these pieces a number of times during my BA, and people were mostly bored by them. I let them roll in and out of my imagination for almost a year before I came up with a solution. I tried all sorts of permutations from creating a fake ‘private view’ in which what was on view was the participants (it was not well articulated enough) to installations where the viewer was complicit in the invasion of privacy by having to depress the image into it’s viewer to be able to see it. At this time I collected an image of a man masturbating in a bathroom. I started thinking more about the display than the viewing, and Private View fell into place. For one hour, every evening for a month, I opened the curtains to the sitting room in my shared house and turned on all the lights in very blatant display. I flash-photographed everyone who looked in the window with my polaroid camera, collecting moments of surprise when someone fell into my trap. This was a really important piece of work for me, as it demonstrates not only my growing obsession with viewer/viewed but also my developing methodology of inversion. This is when I invert a relationship in a work, and it derives from working with negative film in the darkroom.

The second piece of work Little Pieces Of Bread Once Eaten By Starlings has a very different root, but a similar process, and is equally important in pushing along my practice. Since childhood I have been obsessed by abandoned shoes, you know, the odd shoe that you find by the roadside, or – less usually- placed side-by-side in the outside lane of a dual carriageway. I won’t reiterate what I wrote about “Starlings” here- I’ll try and find a copy and attach it as another pdf in good time.  Combining these funny lost shoes with a sense of Hansel and Gretel- you must remember the story of the witch-infested ginger-bread house, though you may not recall how the two children were abandoned in the woods by their parents, their trail of breadcrumbs vanishing into the beaks of birds- I had begun to collect shoes and other items of clothing that I found abandoned. I washed and mended them, with the intention of installing them on rails in an exhibition space. But I wasn’t happy with that proposal and was close to abandoning the work when a chance evening out provided the impetus for revivification. I collected some clothing from a variety of sources (can you tell how I’m fudging the truth of this bit, unwilling to admit my crimes publicly: let’s just say the words ‘washing lines’ and leave the rest to your imagination) and decided to create my own trail of breadcrumb using these very loaded items. The work was installed on the Longshaw Estate in Grindleford, where I photographed the objects and retrieved them. It never existed as a trail per se, only in the photographic reconstruction. The final work (twelve polaroids and two objects) was eventually installed in the Small Gallery at Psalter Lane, Sheffield in a vitrine. I don’t really remember being happy with the work itself, although I have always loved the damaged magenta-tint of the photographs caused by a temperature abberation. I was very pleased with the process of the work, and that’s why I place these two pieces together.

Private View 2001, 1 of 30

Notes for the curious:

Reading: Susan Stewart ‘On Longing’; Bruno Bettelheim ‘The Uses of Enchantment’; Hans Christian Andersen ‘Hansel and Gretel‘; ETA Hoffman ‘The Sandman’; Jacques Lacan ‘Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis‘; Michel Foucault ‘The Birth of The Clinic’

Watching: Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’

random connections: Peeping Tom was written by Leo Marks, who worked with my SOE heroine Violette Szabo GC MBE and wrote her cryptographic poem The Life That I Have.

Heather Dewick, bookbinder can be found at http://heatherdewick.wordpress.com/