is the investigation into lived in and un-lived in spaces, documenting transition and highlighting the unexamined remains of previous events. “The two kinds of space, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth.” (The Poetics of space, Gaston Bachelard, Beacon 1994, P201) My methodology has been to create works for people to interact with and experience senses that might remind them of a memory. I am drawn towards public spaces and site specific work; this piece explores ideas based upon the notion of a non-place. In this piece you will see a space of in-between the actual place acts like a border.



“If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then space which cannot be defined as relational or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.” (Non Places, Marc Auge, verso 2006, p 78)



My practise is fixed in the present and is a conceptual response to culture, identity and history. Depicting atmosphere and residue of place in bus stops, a space to search traces and signs of activity and also a catalyst for the exploration of memory. “For each of us – or thinks he has- the use of it, of this time overloaded with events that encumber the present along with the recent past.” “an individual can feel his own history intersecting with History, can imagine that the two are somehow connected.” (Non Places, Marc Auge, verso 2006, p 29, 30) Enhancing the context with the medium of Polaroid, a form of photography that is becoming extinct and can now take its place in history, the instant developing photograph becomes iconic, being impossible to reproduce increases its exclusivity and relationship to the sensation of memory. This generates a personal relationship between the viewer and the image, unaltered and within real space and time, “like state, the camera is never neutral the representations it produces are highly coded, and the power it wields is never its own.” (The burden of representation, Essays on photography’s and histories, John Tagg 1988, 2002)

This body of work is an attempt to share the experience felt in those locations, they reference to personal experience but at the same time attempt to illuminate broader social public changes “The individual production of meaning is thus more necessary than ever.” (Non Places, Marc Auge, verso 2006, p 37) As there is no significance to the location of the bus stop, it becomes all about the subject matter, repetitive industrial and almost clinical objects that create a non-place, a space of frequent transition. A sense of a glimpse, a sense we experience everyday without a process of registering what we have seen, the minor events of everyday life, this is only registered in our subconscious.



Gemma Bourne