I was artist in residence at Plymouth Arts Centre’s Batter Street Studio from Friday 23 to Monday 26 October 2009, as part of the 10th anniversary of the Campaign for Drawing’s annual programme The Big Draw. During the four days of the residency, I developed ideas for a new practice-as-research project, Measure, exploring the relationship between landscape and the female body through a series of immersive performances with 16mm film. Supported by a research award from MADr, the Centre for Media, Art and Design Research at Plymouth University.The residency enabled me to navigate ‘landscape’ as an embodied spatiotemporal experience, using drawing and film, and to investigate the relationship between the miniature frame and the macro scale of projection. Each day I produced one filmstrip or ‘scroll’ of drawings, using the blade of a surgical scalpel to ‘sketch’ elements of the view I saw through the glass of the studio window. The project’s title refers to the method I used to determine the length of each filmstrip - or ‘scroll’ - using the distance between points on my body, such as from fingertip to fingertip between my outstretched arms, and bisecting my body along a posterior/anterior axis. The length of a strip of film is understood as a measurement of time when the static marks incised into the black 16mm frames are experienced as lines of light in motion during the experience of moving image.
I kept a blog during my residency in October 2012, stream of consciousness writing typed into my laptop, which captured the interweave of perceptual data, action and reflection.
Image: working on a 16mm filmstrip during the residency, October 2009
Outputs
1. Four 16mm engraved filmstrips, or scrolls, variable lengths. A fifth 16mm scroll was created live during The Measure of It at Plymouth Arts Centre, which I projected as a loop on my Specto analysis projector - the strip caught fire and burnt in places, dissolving the screen image in a mass of gorgeous film bubbles (28 April 2010).
2. video documentation of the first projection of my 16mm film-drawing scrolls onto the wall of the Batter Street Studio at Plymouth Arts Centre, using a Specto analysis projector running at 2 frames per second, followed by a QuickTime movie made from hi-res digital photographs shot of each film frame in sequence and played back on a timeline at 12 frames per second;
3. The Measure of It 16mm film-sewing performance with projection, screening and artist’s talk, Batter Street Studio, Plymouth Arts Centre (28 April 2010 6.00pm - 8.30pm)
4. installation of the Measure video documentation with four 16mm animated scrolls [looped] shown on monitor on plinth shown as part of the Exchange exhibition, Avenue Gallery, Northampton (12 to 29 January 2010); at f-word 2, the feminist interdisciplinary research symposium, I illustrated my paper Seeing the vulva with video documentation of my first projection, followed by the animated frames from the four scrolls, Plymouth University (9 March 2010); the project was presented as part of The Purpose of Drawing exhibition, Cube Gallery, Plymouth, as an installation of the Measure video documentation with four 16mm animated scrolls [looped] shown on monitor on a plinth, accompanied by large vitrine containing film-drawing artefacts and lightbox (7 June to 2 July 2010).
5. The long-durational project ‘Luna’ also emerged from this residency: since the beginning of October 2009, I have captured 26 pairs of ‘stereoscopic’ images of the lunar cycle each year: I photograph the visible face of the moon at two points in its cycle - when full, and at my first sight of the waxing crescent - taking two long-exposure hand-held photographs from the same position, a breath apart.
The first projection of one of the four 16mm scrolls from my Studio One residency:
Studio One: Inspector Specto from Kayla Parker on Vimeo.
The four scrolls running chronologically: each frame is photographed and the digital photos are played back at 25 frames per second (PAL video):
The Measure of It from Kayla Parker on Vimeo.
Exhibition
2010
The video documentation of the first projection followed by the animated frames from the four scrolls, shown on a monitor from DVD, was part of an installation with glass cabinet display for The Purpose of Drawing exhibition, Cube Gallery, Plymouth (7 June to 2 July 2010).
At f-word 2, the feminist interdisciplinary research symposium, I illustrated my paper Seeing the vulva with video documentation of my first projection, followed by the animated frames from the four scrolls, Plymouth University (9 March 2010)
The video documentation of my first projection, followed by the animated frames from the four scrolls, was shown on a monitor from DVD at the Land/Water and the Visual Arts Exchange exhibition, Avenue Gallery, University of Northampton (11 to 29 January 2010)
Measure, a one-minute silent loop of the four engraved 16mm scrolls was shown in the Being Human exhibition, Exeter Arts Week; Spacex, Exeter; with Rachael Allain, Laura Hopes, Juliet Middleton-Batts, and Karen Pearson (13 to 21 May 2017)