Fran’s Room
Last year I built a website for Francesca Millican-Slater, a performer who had recently relocated to Birmingham. When I visited her to discuss this I was struck by how batshit crazy her flat was. Converted from offices above some shops in a suburb of Kings Heath it had post-war wood panelling and the maddest carpet (which we used as the background on her site). Coupled with Fran’s packrat detritus it made for a fascinating space.
Fran was fully aware of this and it currently working on a performance based on the flat which has just been stripped down to be refurbished into a proper living space. Before this happened she asked me to document it with my camera. I’ve done this and sent her the pics which will no doubt be emerging as part of her work soon.
But I also wanted to try my hand at something new. I’ve long been a fan on Matt’s panoramas, stitched from hundreds of individual photos taken at different times and fancied having a go myself. The room seemed to lend itself to this so I started clicking.
Once I had enough shots it was really just a question of slogging through them in Photoshop, followed by a return to the flat to fill in a couple of gaps. Ideally I would have done a number of shoots in different lighting conditions to really get a sense of the room but this was effectively a trial run, just to see if I could do it.
I’ve put two treatments of the montage on Flickr in colour and black/white. You can download the original file from there if you want to have a good zoom.
This was a nice way to record all the nooks and crannies of the room and to use some mildly cubist notions to give a new understanding of the space but I’m kinda itching to make something with a bit more meaning to it next.
Yes ‘Fran’s Room’ has a rare blend of the familiar, the out-dated, and style. I don’t know her, but your montages provide me with the illusion that I do.
This work, I feel, is deeper than your through the viewfinder series, which I also liked a lot, and I dare say will probably be more popular.