© Jan Cylwik
LIP Central Satellite Group – online meeting, held on 14th December 2022.
This meeting was devoted to Personal Projects. And projects do not get more personal than Jan Cylwik’s artistic and visual exploration of his journey from heart attack to his full recovery from a quadruple heart by-pass. In one arresting image, Jan’s hands grip a red towel. The towel is in the shape of a heart and is placed over his own heart, the tension in his hands evoking his own anxiety and the fact that you are in other people’s hands. Jan said that nurses have “the hearts of angels”, while at other times he felt more like a cardiogram than a person. Clouds represented Jan’s entry into anaesthesia and the window at the end of an empty corridors signified light at the end of the tunnel – the end of the slow process of recovery. The series culminates in a still from a video, showing Jan smiling and indicating with two fingers that he has successfully climbed two flight of stairs, telling his family not to worry and affirming that he was fit enough to return home.
Janet Nabey described her images as “just a weekend” in Stratford. Christmas markets complete with helter skelter. After Sunday, “when the world turned white” Janet captured her grandchildren battling with huge snow balls to create a snowman family, complete with snow dog.
Alec Wyllie’s trip to La Biennale di Venezia allowed him to capture the bizarre, the absurd and the beautiful. He allows us to make up our own minds about the message and artistic merits of a selection of installations.
Sue Czapska revisited some old images processed before the advent of Photoshop. She takes pleasure more in composition than story telling. Inspired by Matisse, Sue combines the refracted, ethereal light from the windows with shadows of house plants and a hand held out in front of the lens. Some found the red hue gave a sense of calm, others a “trippy” feeling, while some found the images reminded them of early horror movies.
Austin Guest has revisited a small lake in London Colney several times over the past few months. He captures a range of reflections – with a nod to Monet’s gardens at Giverny complete with a small, green, arched footbridge. He captures seasonal changes, with some close ups of tree trunks and others panned back to capture the overall mood.
Robin Barr has three strands to his portfolio of personal projects: Shopfronts; Reservoirs and Reimagining. He presented two excellent images from each of these. Shopfronts: strongly framed and carefully cropped images of abandoned shops – shops which are no longer able to provide “Something Special” or entice us in with their “No win / no fee” offer. Reservoirs: the drought in the summer revealed new perspectives. Again Robin crops precisely to capture unexpected reflections. Reimagining (or “something I see”): here Robin carefully selects painted, scratched and cracked walls and surfaces, focussing on the particular combination that appeals to his eye, all in square format.