Alana Hampton
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Artist Statements
4PActs
Lorraine Pilgrim Gallery September 2013
Video work and stills; The performative qualities of photography and video are revealed in documents of nature where the subject is allowed to speak through the language of the medium. The work evolved from lone walks in the suburban fringes during the liminal times; dusk, moon rise, in transitions of weather, late at night at ‘no-time’ and between tides. The thing on which I fixate performs; framed and choreographed, lit and staged. Mindful of the landscape talking back through the camera, I am alert to the murmurings of the subject below traffic noises and the immediate things that grab attention. The video pieces are sometimes slowed and magnified, but are often equally straight from the camera and the acts of the performance become perceptually ambiguous, almost absurdist when reconstituted in new spaces.
"... performances are not read; rather they are experienced. Performances ... are open to multiple meanings, which are derived from the experience of consumption, which may involve a host of emotional and psychological responses, not just 'intellectual' ones." Leavy, P 2008, p.344
Leavy, Patricia (2008). Performance-based emergent methods. In Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber & Patricia Leavy (Eds.), Handbook of emergent methods (pp.343-357). New York: Guilford.
Alana Hampton
Lorikeet Island: Collaborative 9 Video Installation with Marian Drew
Gold Coast City Art Gallery March 2012
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
Edward Lear
Lorikeet Island is both real and elusive. It is a documentary tale that lies between lunar tides and human habitation. Like our bodies, it breathes, moves and changes and has a skin that breaks to reveal a labyrinth of roots and arteries. Situated between metaphoric undercurrents and a forest of trees, it has an under and above world of beings that come alive each day, drawn by lunar and solar rhythms. In our imagination it links childhood and adult memory and feeling, somewhere between the burrowing soldier crabs on pockets of sandy beach the morphing trees and the vestibules of lorikeet nesting holes.
Marian Drew and Alana Hampton
Underwater World
Queensland Centre for Photography June/July 2011
Underwaterworld ~ all depth below
“Before becoming a conscious sight, every landscape is an oneiric experience. Only those scenes that have already appeared in dreams cn be viewed with an aesthetic passion.”
Bachelard, G, 1983 Water and Dreams (E. R Farrell, trans) p5
The photographic and video works in this collection are part of a much larger body of work. Glimpses of local watery places; the islands, rivers and mangrove swamps of the Gold Coast, they document journeys taken by day and night through the waterways. Captured from on and below the waterline, the works map the transitions of tidal-time, light, sound and mood; gleanings from Nature that are often made invisible by the gloss and ‘noise’ of the holiday strip. They navigate a liminal place; recording traces of human presence and the otherness of our daily place in the world.
The video footage suggests an abstracted narrative of my approach and submersion into this place, not home. Both documentary and metaphoric, the work uses sound and the experience of the ‘plunge’ to immerse the viewer (and myself) into another environment that is not only physical, but also psychological. The eye touches what it sees ... the body is always present (Bachelard).
Alana Hampton
The Contradictions of Water: Reflections on 88 years in The River
Finalist Perceval Portrait Prize 2014
in the collection of HOTA gallery
The river carries its own perception of water. Few molecules are more stable or more difficult to decompose than H2O. Still, its becalmed surface belies what moves deep below. A river, its underground hyporheic zone, its aquifer are all part of a single system, every drop inseparable in the confluence as it roils through time. Human perception is often blind to this other reality; seduced like Narcissus, our sense of sight is limited by light. As a child in Tasmania, Dad revealed the language of light and water as we hunted flounder on the dark moon with an underwater torch.
Alana Hampton