Review
The critic Roland Barthes implied that memory is not so much image, as sensation and that a photograph is never in essence a memory---but it actually blocks memory.
Cuttriss has sought to depict in his photographs sensation rather than memory, and has taken the challenge from Barthes statement to make photographs that are the visual equivalent of feelings.
He has presented the viewer with a seductive amalgam of vibrant colours flooded with light or hidden in shadow.
There are openings and passages to unseen places amidst uneasy resting places, where we often struggle to come to terms with scale or viewpoint.
The large scale of the photographs force the viewer to observe from a distance, whilst those seeking a more intimate view find the image dissolving into a dream like confusion.
“John Cuttriss creates with his photographs an uncanny world of dream-like interiors.
We are invited us to construct our own narrative as we explore his beautiful but unsettling world.”
Paul Hayward (Senior lecturer Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.)
PINHOLE MESMERISM
THE ART OF JOHN CUTTRISS
Robert Clark
In a recent statement the artist John Cuttriss describes his working method as ‘a mesmeric combination of time, light, serendipity and meditation.’ Whilst the curative claims of the 18th century Franz Mesmer’s manipulation of his subject’s magnétisme animal might be of little relevance here, it is telling that Cutriss chooses such a peculiarly evocative term to describe his highly ritualised creative rhythm. Cuttriss’s elaborate shadow play of fiction and fact, his interplay of photographic reflection and sculptural reconstruction, achieves a distinct transfixion. His subjects appear ostensibly to be rather banal domestic interiors, yet their aura of homeliness is often inflected with the kind of numinous radiance one finds in the most majestic of cathedrals. Or in the most marvellous of urban constructions: Cuttriss admits to being once spellbound by a Brooklyn Bridge sunrise – an experience which he describes as if it was of formative creative import.
Cuttriss’s favoured photographic tool is the most primal picture-making mechanism available, the pinhole camera. Naturally occurring pinhole projections were observed in sunlight passing through interlacing leaves as far back as 400 BC by Greek philosophers such as Aristotle at a time when the Greeks generally believed the phenomenon of sight was made possible by eyes projecting rays of light onto their subjects. Cutriss’s photographic reveries quiver ambiguously between objective record (even a pinhole camera can only capture what is in fact there – Cutriss never resorts to digital manipulation) and subjective projection (the sequences accrue the undeniable impression of a personal journal).
Cuttriss’s use of the pinhole camera achieves perspectives in which peripheral vision holds the central focus in a kind of circle of bewilderment. A lone chair is evidence of at least one protagonist, yet the scenarios are always deserted. These are in fact not so much uninhabited interiors as rooms full of life’s traceries, of significant memories. Cuttriss reminds us that an image in memory is substantially at variance to an image of present physical perception. A memory of a person, especially of a lost loved one, is more often provoked by intimate catalysts such as a fragment of ridiculous melody, a scent of perfume, the precise peculiarities of a persons’ gestures, a barely perceptible vocal inflexion, than by the mundane objectivity of a family album mugshot. Cuttriss’s family homes come alive with lost souls. The typically low viewpoint suggests a child’s perspective, or an adult’s memory of a childhood world-view. Stairs, windows and furniture loom, whilst period carpeting is seen in curious close-up. I am reminded of the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s pronouncement that poetry is ‘childhood recovered at will’. On the other hand these low-lying viewpoints could more ominously suggest the disorientated perspectives of a prone adult victim of some unstated misfortune. After all, Cuttiss’s images rely for their impact on an unnerving hint of suspension of control. Disorientation becomes considerably less of a simple delight when it is inadvertent. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud, taking up Baudelaire’s theme by declaring that poetry is ‘the systematic disorientation of the senses’, went on to retreat from such visionary creativity in fear for his sanity. These might be enchanting images, but maybe they are far from merely charming.
It is one of the particular characteristics of a pinhole camera that one cannot really view the scene (as one can with a viewfinder) whilst ‘taking’ the shot. The image thus appears as if almost alchemically only when developed. This aura of suspense gives rise to some wonderfully precarious compositions. Intriguingly Cutrtiss subsequently uses these unforeseen photographic glimpses as source material for meticulously crafted sculptural models. His construction materials are often redolent of historical use. The wear and tear of surfaces relates to the kind of revelations to be experienced at any demolition site (those left-over expanses of stained wallpaper, those eroded layers of DIY paint, a forevermore dud plug socket, a soiled scattering of lately delivered unopened envelopes). Cuttriss’s model sculptures tend to lead the viewer architecturally astray. Stairways lead up to thin air. Doors open onto claustrophobic obscurity. Childhood dens are summonsed from the most uncomfortable of corners. Sometimes Cuttriss frames these small-scale interiors so that one has to bow down to view as if in a fairground peep show. The interiors are revealed as the subjects of the kind of furtive curiosity that leaves one with the embarrassment of half broken taboos. One is glimpsing evidences of memories which, being left in states of aesthetic and thematic suspense, necessarily, in order to complete the picture, make one resort to recollections of those moments one thought were almost exclusively one’s own.
Cuttriss’s art derives from, and is driven by, the fact that the sharing of personal memories, whether they be memories of a more dear or more distressing kind, is crucial to social and cultural sensitivity. The fact that something mattered. The fact that it was worth remembering and revivifying, of bringing back to self-sufficient life. The fact that, ultimately, of course, we never have the remotest of chances of exactly matching or sharing memories. But, thus, somehow, through this struggle to picture life’s passing, just now and again, perhaps such truisms and banalities might be transubstantiated into art.
Robert Clark