Tony Ellwood

Brighton University

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Artist Statement:

In No Time

Only the infinity of sea and time............

Rime of the ancient mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Hopi, a Native American tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?

In Emanuelle Kant’s terms, time is only empirically real and does not exist independently.

We are born without awareness, and we emerge into a theatre of consciousness in the rhythm of hours, days, and years, each following the next.

What we call time comes full circle with the ebb and flo of the tide, the hourly ringing of the classroom bell, nightly prayers, solstices, equinoxes, birth and death.

However, in a world guided by the convention of time, how often are we aware of it passing?

A part of our lives is immersed in our individual universes, always on the threshhold of distraction, unaware of most of our surroundings, constantly stepping in and out of what common sense insists on calling the “here and now”.

Water has been used as a metaphor because of its linear constancy, like time, always moving, ever changing, part the of whole.

The images within this body of work are constructed within the camera, captured over extended periods of time, using a series of multiple exposures, ranging from seconds to hours. Each picture is therefore an amalgam of realities, each layer blending with the other to form the final image.

The pier images,part one,of which these images are only a small part and the seascape images,part two, again only part of a much larger body of work, are related and as such fall under the same title. The location used within the first part of the work is a place I visit to think, for inspiration or to escape the world for a while. The second part of the work involves a progression to other locations along the south east coastline, but in their case, impermanent vistas I have stumbled across, views that allow me to step outside of myself for short periods.

Tony Ellwood

Brighton University