Alex Duncan

‘I made the works at the time I remember, as a response to wanting just work with water as a medium, attempting in a way to go back to a blank canvas, to start a fresh approach to making work. Over time and lots of experiments and mistakes, I discovered that by ‘soaking’ a particular type of photographic paper with water, this lifted the ink from the paper allowing it to be liquid again. I then move the ink around with a brush and my fingers to in a sense ‘reanimate’ the stillness of the water in the photograph.
I wanted to try and put across the power and energy that was imbued in the materiality of water, to animate something that had been paused and made a memento of through a photograph. All the images I use (often ones taken by friends and family) are snapshots – an unthought of image, they were never taken with making the work in mind, so I tried to respond to each image differently, and that way they too felt fresh… flooding out beyond the confines of the image onto the board, or rising up into a maelstrom seemingly at odds with the surrounding cityscape. ‘