When reflecting on my ‘rock circle’ pieces I mentioned how the process of creating these was interesting – the way they grew slowly and steadily outwards until they covered the whole page. Yet this wasn’t something that the viewer was able to appreciate when presented with only the end product, so I went on to create a stop-motion animation as a way of capturing this:
I removed the rock element and focussed purely on the lines as obviously it would have been hard to scan the rocks in so I felt it was a little pointless to just have unexplained gaps in the centre. The piece is a little shaky in places as I was only lining each scan up by hand, and in a couple of places a speck of dirt or fluff creeps into the image, but generally I would say the piece successfully captures the idea of growth that I wanted it to. For me, this exploration of growth links back to some of the work I did on my Foundation course looking at it both in terms of the growth of bacteria, the growth of civilisation over a landscape, and growth in an abstract, uncontextualized form. It also obviously links to the work I am creating now; although I have removed the obvious link to rocks by removing them from the pattern, it is a time-based work so it does begin to explore more closely the concept of time and duration that I am trying to access through the study of the rocks.
At the moment I see the piece as fairly stand-alone; although there are ways I could make variations or adjustments to it (such as different speeds, patterns etc), I see this as a finalising, for now at least, of the ‘rock circle’ pieces. It may prove to be an interesting segue into doing more involved time-based media work in the future, or perhaps I could incorporate the stop-motion/lines into other pieces, but for now it is sufficient that I have just captured the idea.
(Later edit – slightly different version entitled Ebb and Flow):
Anna Harris 