Transporting skies, people, and landscape between Penzance and Sheffield, Susan Collins draws from both landscape and trompe l’oeil traditions in painting to create works which unfold in real time, concertinaing space, time and location through a sequence of networked installations.
One of the works uses cameras and projections to draw visitors into the work, transmitting them via the internet in real time to the remote gallery space. Visitors to Site Gallery, Sheffield may find themselves beamed to Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, and vice versa. The work makes it possible for visitors to both galleries to become active participants in the realisation of the work, embodied as live performers within it, effectively existing in two places at once.
A second work exchanges an urban Sheffield landscape with the Penzance seascape pixel by pixel over the course of the exhibition, each pixel recording a different moment in time throughout the duration of the show.
Developed from ideas prompted by the pioneering telegraph communications station at Porthcurro near Newlyn in Cornwall, which was the first place to be “on-line’ in the contemporary sense, Susan Collins’ new work is presented at Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance and Site Gallery, Sheffield simultaneously.
Susan Collins is director of the Slade Centre for Electronic Media, Slade School of Fine Art, London. Since 1993 she has worked internationally with site specific installation, often in the form of interventions in a range of public spaces. Further information is available at www.susan-collins.net
The exhibition has been curated by Emily Ash and funded through the National Touring Programme of the Arts Council of England