Lou Hazelwood | Landscapes of the (Un)known | March 2020
Through the alchemical processes of the analogue darkroom, Hull based artist Lou Hazelwood brings to BasementArtsProject a series of abstract photographic artworks. Using alternative methods of production and old photographic paper stock these artworks are something akin to rural landscapes.
The artist also has a fascination with the rapidly disappearing structures of the gasometer, and alongside her abstracted landscapes will be a series of images dedicated to these now endangered pieces of industrial architecture.
Hazelwood’s exhibition is an exhortation to the viewer to re-engage with photography as an abstract art form and as documentation of worlds both known and unknown
BasementArtsProject had to close its doors two weeks into Lou Hazelwood’s project due to the emergence of COVID-19 and the governments subsequent lock down of the UK. What follows is a few questions I put to Lou via e-mail and a Virtual Tour of the exhibition narrated by myself and the artist. Over the years BasementArtsProject has also developed a series of community focussed events based around a meal provided by Basement and a guided tour given by the artist. As we were unable to accomplish it this time we instead went online with Zoom and did things differently . . .
Whilst the idea of showing the fine detail of what are in fact very dark images via a computer screen proved to be quite problematic the accompanying videos give a good sense of how the exhibition is laid out and what it is about. Also the conversations in the accompanying soundtracks give an insightful dimension to curatorial, technical and conceptual aspects of the work.
LOU HAZELWOOD: A Conversation
Although you are now a Hull based artist you originally came from Leeds. Could you tell us something about your interests and education that has led you to the kind of work that you now produce as an artist?
Yes, and I still love Leeds, I guess you always do when it’s your hometown. I studied my foundation at Jacob Kramer 1990-91 after doing Photography O & A levels at my school. I failed my art O level and am really glad I did! However even though Photography was my passion I did attempt to paint at Jacob Kramer and got told in no uncertain terms I was not a painter! Which I agree with, but I liked the abstraction and mark making some painters could achieve and I drew loads in charcoal and inks at that point. I also received a Bolex Super 8 camera in my transition from foundation to University and obsessively filmed tuning signals on an old portable b&w TV in my bedroom. So, transitions between colleges and transition between media, still and moving and abstraction all floated around whilst I tried to make sense and began to do a lot of text based artworks. In fact, as part of a 1994 degree show over in Hull I made sets of playing cards and large billboards posted on to an unused billboard site in Hull of text and image works with good old ‘Letraset’.
I still took lots of photographs and loved all the analogue darkrooms we had in Hull, for b&w, colour and movie film, great times.
Whilst there I was fortunate enough to go to Maastricht European Biennale of Arts in 1993 and work with Lawrence Weiner and students from all over Europe. I’ll chat about that more in the lockdown journal piece.
Jumping forward a while, on my MA I worked with found footage and nostalgia and what was recorded and displayed in relation to values, class and economics. I remade some viewing machines for example a ‘mutoscope’ and produced a text, a palimpsest that became the place for group readings, which then became quite unexpectedly choral, which was very exciting and consuming. I even made a bronze book, declaring “I like stealing other people’s memories” and “forgery is fun”!
Post MA I had Arts Council Funding working with a chemist at The University of Hull where we used silver nitrate-based chemicals on to inkjet prints and through experimentation created works that took me back to my loved analogue processes and how I could manipulate and abstract them. During the last few years I have been chemically interrupting the film processing and working with vintage papers and light in the darkroom that have evolved into part of this body of work Landscapes of the Un(known)
Alongside solely darkroom practices I like the happenstance nature of working with old film stock and glass plates and this ability to create with a fear it may be lost.
In this exhibition there is only one conventionally produced photograph: a single colour image of a Gas-o-meter, a structure which does crop up on numerous other occasions throughout the exhibition. Can you tell us a bit about this structure as it obviously has some significance?
I’ve always been intrigued by them and with this image in particular I wanted to give some clarity to the more abstracted works as a statement, in that these are the amazing structures that are currently still part of our landscape so almost a call to remember them. [Is this, perhaps, a reason why they are always empty in your images, abstract or otherwise, because the structures seem like such a delicate and, dare I say, almost insubstantial latticework of no more than lines when not containing the rest of the cylinder construction? Just a drawing in open space!] I have that memory that I think many of us share of questioning what the structure was as a child and why sometimes it was high in the sky and others it wasn’t, what did it do and why? It was such a dominant feature of the landscape that the echo of it in these now empty ironwork structures are almost a patterned remembrance and that makes me think of lace and our ability to use it to shield the domestic which was heated by the shielded structure of the gasometer by its holder, peeking at times ‘from behind the curtain’. I just think seeing these working structures as a child and now seeing them as they stand and then disappear, they and ‘their lifespan’ are just continually fascinating to me in that they are both simultaneously known and unknown.
Where is that particular structure?
These two gasholders are in Keighley and are I believe are protected so will be part of the landscape for the foreseeable, they are also the same gasholders in the film where you can hear the sounds that surround them from industrial to natural.
As you move into the exhibition, and the specific selection of images that you have chosen to show at BasementArtsProject, the Gas-O-Meter is a recurring motif throughout and is very much in line with the idea of physical landscape but gradually the images dissolve into very abstracted forms yet I can still feel that these non-images are landscapes. Here I feel that the landscape changes from exterior to interior. Would you say that this is true, does it revolve around the process side of your art and what could you tell us about that transition and the difference / similarities between the two?
You mean the abstracted images of the gasholders? The abstraction is playing with our views of the gasholders, circular and fading in process and out of our focus, as is the landscape as we pass by. It is only when we physically stop, we see a segmented part of a landscape.
We can also never know these structures in the landscape intimately as they are so monumental and I was thinking how could I bring this in to view so in regard to your question about the landscape changing from exterior and becoming an interior I guess this was my approach but not thinking a domesticity in an interior but more about intimacy and the tenderness of and fragility of this urban ironwork, especially when the landscape is rapidly changing around it. That’s why I produced a couple of the films as well so we can hear the sounds that surround the structure, as we cannot her the silent workings of the structures anymore and also why the other film interjects text in that offers suggestion of human interaction with the structures.
The particular process-based side of my work happens two-fold with actual chemical manipulation and happenstance experiments and by the internal thought processes and they feed each other continually, so I can’t say that there is particular differences between them.
I’m thinking then that the process is the interior landscape, the world outside creeping into the darkroom and becoming part of what happens in your mind as you plan how a work will evolve. The processing of analogue photography in the camera and the darkroom is a very precise art. How much of your practice, which is experimental by nature, evolves around happenstance, improvisation, educated guesswork and / or calculation? I suspect that there are elements of all of that.
Yes they all have a part to play along with trusting the process and being happy to make mistakes but alongside that is a confidence in the materials, process and myself as an artist to know that by using something unpredictable such as vintage film and papers will be a sense of experimentation, so a letting go of exactness.
I also must say I research the materials I am using widely and will have an idea of what will work/not but am always surprised, like the first time I saw an image appear in the developer because the alchemy of photography is truly wondrous. I have worked with photography for a long time but also have a varied practice from installation to performance, text and sound and I think all of them share similarities in approaches to process and thought both internal and external. That’s part of the artist’s role to offer re-looking’s or re-hearings.
Another piece I did and that I am currently editing sound files for a release is the transposing of La Bohème from pianola roll to several music box scores, which is looking at the mechanisation of music and women’s roles as both the bohemian and the hysteric.
Your own practice is based on analogue and experimental techniques both in camera and darkroom but what is your take on digital photography and how photography is viewed in the contemporary art landscape?
I’m really excited that there is the space for both and we can access both. I get frustrated with those who use digital as a point & shoot medium expecting perfection and not thinking, that has made ‘digital’ become the manifestation of Kodak’s declaration ‘You press the button and we do the rest’ But also I have to stop myself as there is something that I really like about the snapshot and what the snapshot has become in the contemporary world. It’s classless and that really excites me. Our image laden society is managed by many not the few.
VIRTUAL TOUR
LUNCHTIME CONVERSATION
PREVIEW
Friday 6th March | 7:30 - 9:30pm
Exhibition Open
Sunday 8th March | 2pm - 4pm
Monday 9th March | March | 11am - 2pm
Thursday 12th March | 11am - 2pm
Sunday 15th March | 2pm - 4pm
Monday 16th March | 11am - 2pm
Thursday 19th March | 11am - 2pm
Exhibition Remains Open By Appointment until
Monday 30th March
Lunchtime Conversation
Tuesday 17th March | 12 - 2pm
To get a FREE TICKET for this event visit the link below. 10 places only.
Lou Hazelwood
Lou originally from Leeds is an artist based in Hull since 1991. She has many years experience of exhibiting both regionally . . . . READ MORE
