The Magic Boomerang (Time Stands Still)

Gabrielle Hoad | The Magic Boomerang (Time Stands Still) | 2023 | 
Photo-silkscreen print 53cm x 15.5cm 

My four printing classes with Double Elephant Print Workshop in Exeter are now complete and I’ve been trying to make sense of what I've achieved. I have a long way to go to be in control of my screen-printing technique (too many smudges, blots, slips and uneven applications of ink) but I have learned a lot about the possibilities.

Rather than trying to make an edition or a perfectly registered four-colour prints, I was primarily interested in using screen-printing as a way of exploring time, sequence, layering and repetition. These long, thin images of overlapping frames are the result. 

I've been working with found images from a 1960's children’s TV programme called The Magic Boomerang. The series centres on a magic boomerang: when it flies in the sky all time stands still, but the thrower is still able to move. It felt like a fun way of revisiting my longstanding interest in work of the chronophotographer Etienne Jules Marey(1830 -1904), his fascination with capturing the motion of animals, and his pioneering work in the development of cinema.

I've enjoyed the ways the images acquire traces of the different processes through which they've passed, from scratching and wear on the analogue film to digitisation to halftone processing and physical printing with sticky ink. I hope to return to Double Elephant by the summer to work more independently and develop this work further.

CAMP Research Residency

 

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Clouded Border work in progress | 2022

I am immensely grateful to have been awarded - with Megan Calver - the latest CAMP Research Residency. It gives us the opportunity to research the lesser-known experimental work of Alec Harley Reeves (1902-1971) as a basis for inventing new ways to tune into hidden signals in the landscape.

Reeves was a brilliant engineer, a pioneer of digital communications and the inventor of a World War II radio navigation system known as Oboe. But he also devised many practical experiments to investigate psychic phenomena. We hope to use these experiments as a cue for making our own actions and sculptural interventions that invite dialogue with the more than human.

We discovered Reeves last year while working at Durlston Country Park in Swanage on our exhibition Clouded Border. The CAMP residency means we can dig deeper into the archives and make contact with people and sites closely associated with Reeves’ legacy.

We will be supported by a Critical Friend, Kate Paxman and will be holding an end of residency sharing event in April, date and venue to be confirmed.

This work is supported by the CAMP Research Residency. CAMP is a member-led support and professional development network for artists, arts producers, curators and arts writers in Devon and Cornwall www.camp-membership.org