Fancy Pictures
‘Tula Fancies’, Medium format audio-slide show, 14 mins
‘Fancy Pictures’, 16mm film, 18mins
‘Four photographs for the Bedroom’, four prints, 85cm x 70cm
Commissioned by Mount Stuart Trust, and installed at the Visitor Centre, and Mount Stuart House, Isle of Bute, Scotland
‘Fancy Pictures’ (16mm film loop, 18 min, silent, 2008)
Shot in the grounds of Mount Stuart and on Bute farms, the film ‘Fancy Pictures’ features several ultra slow motion sequences of indigenous animal life filmed in front of backdrops taken from Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century portrait paintings in the Dining Room at Mount Stuart. The portraits include works by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Allan Ramsay and Sir Henry Raeburn.
Neville questions the role of landscape in portrait painting, the changing relationships between landowners and animal life, and creature symbolism in film history.
Interwoven is a film that depicts a group of young cygnets feeding and playing, apparently unprotected, until the camera pans out slightly, but dramatically to reveal the powerful presence of the pen (mother). The piece works as a hypnotic meditation on themes of family, and representation of the swan as an ethereal symbol of light, alchemy and self transformation within heraldry and ancient mythology.
The term ‘Fancies’ was first used in 1737 by art chronicler George Vertue to describe paintings by Mercier of scenes of everyday life, but with elements of imagination, invention or storytelling. Later, the name ‘fancy pictures’ was given by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the supreme examples of the genre produced by Gainsborough in the decade before his death in 1788, featuring rural life in particular.
The artist says: “I think wildlife film-making and cinematography is essentially an updated version of British 18th Century landscape painting. Even since Muybridge, I think technological advances in photographic techniques, and how we use them to frame animals, say as much about value systems in Britain today, as a painting by Reynolds tells us about the aristocracy’s relationship to the land two hundred years ago. I decided to make this connection using backdrops, so that the wildlife action in the foreground would seem almost like an elegant graffiti”
‘Tula Fancies’ (audio-slide installation, looped, 14min, 2008)
Neville’s photographs of rural life on Bute reference Old Master painting, scientific imagery, wildlife books, Soviet pictorial types of the 1920’s, editorial, social documentary, and fashion photography. The slide projected images collectively suggest that there is a mystical, religious relationship between animal life and the island community, present in the reality of rural life, but also evident throughout the art and craft works commissioned for centuries in Mount Stuart itself. The variety of photographic genres Neville employs works to undermine the notion of a unified, authentic, social documentary vision, in favour of a fluctuating depiction of identity.
The title of the work refers both to the 18th century term in British painting, ‘fancies’, designating imaginative scenes of quotidian rural life, but also to Tula, an agricultural region in Russia.
Neville approached the taking of each image on Bute as if he were imagining a document of the Soviet Union, searching for faces, landscapes, and scenes that seemed to resonate with his knowledge of existing imagery found both in social documentary photographs and Russian Cinema.
Further investigating the validity of this comparison, the artist then presented twenty of the images to a head boy and head girl at local school Rothesay Academy, claiming the shots were taken in Tula, and asked them to make an accompanying soundtrack inspired by mother Russia. The resulting, haunting soundtrack is the work of Megan Alexander and Kerr Slaven, and is inspired by the images and the misinformation about their origin that was provided.
Neville says: ‘I am interested by the way in which social documentary ( and all photography) lies about place, location, and cultural identity, but also in the way it gives up other truths, about dreams, travel, and fantasy. I thought about Russia in the context of this project for lots of reasons: firstly, it has become the cliche destination of every budding (and professional) social documentary photographer. Secondly, I have never been there before, so my imagining of the place is still extremely vivid. Thirdly, given the geographical and cultural distances between Bute and Tula, there still seem to be a huge amount of fertile and lyrical similarities that can be drawn up. Both British and Russian societies were based upon a feudal system. We like to think that life here is more transparent than in Russia, but the conditions, role and position of the farming communities in relation to their respective governments is remarkably similar, and distinctively difficult. Lastly, Tula is home to the famous Tula accordion, and I thought it interesting that this instrument should also have a powerful home in Scotland. Ultimately though, the association is meant to be ambiguous, so another viewer might well make very different social or poetic connections.’
‘Photographs for the House’ (group of four framed prints, 2008)
‘Goat Pedicure’ (silver gelatin fibre print, 64cm x 75cm, 2008)
‘Mr and Mrs Curry’ (cibachrome print, 75cm x 85cm, 2008)
‘Supper’ (c-type print, 75cm x 85cm, 2008)
‘Newborn Lamb’ (c-type print, 75cm x 85cm, 2008)
Neville has introduced into the House four of his photographic portraits of people and places from the Isle, grouped together: They seem at first glance to be unrelated social documents. Further investigation reveals subtle and contradictory references both to the history of photography and to painting.
Neville says: “Their positioning within the House acts to question the role of social documentary photography, both its relation to context and dissemination, and how it at once celebrates and manipulates its subjects. The images reference the House’s relationship to painting sometimes through the poses of its subjects, which may seem to echo Gainsborough’s ‘Mr and Mrs. Andrews’, or sometimes through the lighting, which might quote Caravaggio’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’. However, they simultaneously also refer to the impulse in 1920’s social documentary photography, later common in Soviet pictorial types, to orchestrate its subjects into stylized compositions that glorify the relationship between people and the land. The suggestion being, that it is people, not machines, that are the source of a country’s wealth. This message is counterbalanced with the contradictory references to painting genres which reinforce the idea that power is a result of land ownership, and that images should foremost be aesthetically pleasing in order to communicate. I hope the result is ambiguous.”
Selected stills from the audio-slide show 'Tula Fancies'
Production stills from the audio-slide show 'Tula Fancies'
