16 mm, projection (looped)
Duration 02:21
I came across two poems by W.S. Merwin after reading about his lifetime efforts to grow and preserve a rare Hawaiian palm forest. In The Rain At Night there is this sense of trying to get your head around expansive, slow and non human time, such as the growth of trees and how quick it is to chop one down. In Waking To The Rain there is an awareness of close human time such as the ageing or collapse of his father's body and the sound of falling rain.
Both poems made me think about my own father and how his body had changed, I was suddenly aware that his body had aged. Within a woodland close to our house, I wanted to make a piece about touch, contact, slow and sudden time.
Clay cast of two hands touching. Fibre-based warmtone hand print. 339 x 290mm framed.
Text extract from Rodrigo Orrantia’s essay On Touch (or the impossibility of touch)
The clay cast in the image is a direct reproduction of two hands; the creases and folds on the material are evidence of their contact. But then the photograph of this unusual object – a second layer of representation – frees it from its original reference, and for me its message becomes the absence of the hands and the fleetingness of their contact.
I read it as an image of an absence, an attempt to preserve an instant that is no more. Both the cast and the photograph capture a void, but it is certainly the latter that makes it evident. Bilton elaborates this thought by talking about his work and notions of loss. “It is a continuation into processing concepts of loss, emptiness, mutability and endings. I am particularly interested in my own inability to fully understand endings and I seem to reflect backwards and forwards in time to things I’ve lost and fear losing. These photographs that encompass walking, impressions and casting both in the form of light and clay are a witness to the material traces of the bodies closest and furthest from me.”
Thinking about touch -especially in the context of the current situation- this work reminds me of an abstract type of absence, perhaps not actually of physical touch, but of an emotional contact with another person.
Bilton’s image also prompts me to think about the futility of our attempts to hold on to memories, recreating them in the hope of extending or reliving associated emotions. This discussion inevitably points back to photography and its connection to memory. But it is the intermediacy of the clay object that disrupts an otherwise conventional reference, creating a more obscure take on the subject. The way the cast is lit, and how it stands on a pedestal against a dark background make it seem like a monument of sorts. It is also the monochrome image that imbues it with a type of solemnity.
