photography

Libraries Gave Us Power by Mark Gubb

A collaborative photographic project documenting the, over-800, libraries that have closed in the UK since 2010 (under this Tory government). I will publish a list of the libraries and their, defunct, addresses, with an invitation for anyone/everyone to photograph the buildings or sites and share them with me as part of the project, as a fully credited collaborator. These images could be a series of zines, a book, a video, an exhibition, or all of them.

Origami Extreme by Mark Gubb

Take a sheet of any size screw-up-able material and screw it up into a ball.

Take a photo.

Flatten it out again and trace over every fold and crease line with a fine-liner pen.

The reference photo and the lines on the piece of paper then exist as some sort of extreme (impossible?) origami proposition.

Cultural Icon Fire by Mark Gubb

This could be a performance, an action, a video, a photograph, or all of them.

Using a flammable liquid or gel, a large pentagram (for example) is drawn on the floor, after dark. This is then set alight.

I have also imagined this as a potential series of ‘round iconography’ burns i.e. do the same with an anarchy symbol, C.N.D., a smiley etc.

A Repeatable Action-Work by Mark Gubb

Every artist needs a simple action-work that they can do anywhere, anytime (for example, on arrival somewhere), which transforms a fairly modest moment into a moment of creativity, capturing something of that moment and lending it significance (even if it doesn’t really have any).

Something like:

Balling/screwing-up a blank piece of A4 paper, then photographing it in-situ.

Keeping the disposable cup from the first cup of coffee you drink in a new destination.

Sending a postcard to your dead Grandmother’s last address.

In some ways, it doesn’t really matter what the action is, it’s just a physical representation of a moment. The success of a work like this exists in the repetition. One balled-up and photographed piece of A4 is photograph of a piece of trash, whereas 100 photographs of balled-up pieces of A4 in different locations becomes a marker of time.