Interview with Ryan L. Moule

In your new photo-series, which is presented in the exhibition “Latency Principles” at Nextart Gallery, you have left the photographs chemically unfixed. Why? And what kind of impact does this working-method have on the images?

Both bodies of work exhibited at Nextart form a question in relation to complex processes of forgetting. The unfixed surface of these photographic prints act silently initially, we don’t see the eroding process in the same way as the video documentation of ‘January 1988’. The hidden quality of this slower process is something that can be overlooked. I like that the first reading of the images can be changed once the viewer is informed of the process (or when revisiting the exhibition they see a physical change in the prints surface).

I think this second hidden reading of an image is the thing that i’m most drawn to when thinking about the re-presentation of any given event. Within the act of forgetting there is an oscillation between this first and second reading. For instance, the first layer of forgetting is knowing we’ve forgotten something, like someone’s name or a place. We know we know it but we can’t quite access it. The second layer of forgetting on the other hand is what we don’t know we’ve forgotten. Its this realisation of an unknown, unknown that all my works look towards.

The rooms photographed both physically balance between appearance and disappearance (insofar as they are on the edges of the land, about to fall into the sea) but also for me they act as a psychological spaces, like chambers of the mind that perhaps cannot be accessed but only glimpsed.

I find this reappearance and disappearance of ‘trace’  both uncomfortable and deeply melancholic. Perhaps its best understood as the image of an outline when you close your eyes.  It presents itself unfixable.

In “January 1988″ the photo of you and your mother is slowly blurred in water. It’s like a reverse developing-process, where you dissolve the photo instead of preserving it. Do you remember when and how you got this idea? And was it a painful procedure?

It was a very organic process, born from a personal response to the contemporary condition of the image. In a time in which medium is ubiquitous, the referent seemed to me to be hollowed of any inherent meaning. Throwaway, superficial almost. Flicking through images from my family archive an image of my mother (younger than I am now) and me as a baby, arrested my attention. The first reading of the image personal, but its second reading became far more troubling. The fear that this image, an image that represents not just surface, but something far more complex, could, after my time be something throwaway, something superficial, something entirely hollowed of inherent meaning was something too intense to ignore.

I began to think of the chemical make up of the image and how its apparent stillness could be pushed to its limits. Its a simple action that once initiated is undoable.

The role of the one-off sculptural work in which the original image is erased in front of a live audience acts in some way to reference the way memory is constructed. Witnessing the actual erasure within a live situation has a different reading to the presentation of the video documentation of this work.

Our relationship to technology and the ability to recall lost information is something that has changed the way we need to remember. This prosthetic memory that technology enables us to have at our disposal, being able to recall almost anything through a search engine or database, I think questions the ability to forget anything. This question of total recall is almost as frightening as total loss.

What are you working on at the moment? 

I’m still developing the photographic works which are on show at Nextart. Its very fresh work (made in early 2013) so still have lots of negatives to look at. I’ve also been making a crystal chemical which is made of salts. It looks like ice but unlike ice, this substance remains solid at room temperature. This work is being made as a commission for a new site specific work for ‘Waddesdon Manor’ in Buckinghamshire, England.  The work is set to be complete by the end of the summer months so lots of experimentation will begin shortly. I also have my final show at the Royal College of Art which i’m slowly working toward. I’m going to be in the dark room for the next two months making very large and very black photographic prints. Fun times!