Niall
Bingham
Studio Portraits
Tamara Moss had an adjacent studio to mine at University Corner, whilst completing her Masters in Fine Art. In the spirit of neighborly respect, and out of convenience I approached her to make collaborative paintings. The manifesto below is a high quality print of a scan of the notes I took (in pencil on A4 paper) whilst in conversation with Tamara before the project began.
The paintings set out to record her impression of me before working together, and how that impression may or may not have evolved during the collaboration.
Tamara requested that I attach a GoPro camera to my head for a week so that she could capture my daily routines in order to 'get to know me'. She gave me prompts to direct some of my decisions, and to collect some objects, but otherwise left me to choose when to record. It was difficult to perform everything that she asked but I made an attempt. In the end we had a substantial amount of footage to work with.
Stills from the resulting footage were earmarked as a starting point for these canvases, so that we would not argue over subject matter. Moss is a painter, and thus the large scale canvases catered to her medium of choice, but also incorporated elements of screen printing and stencil. We hoped to unpack the notion of 'persona', and its fluidity in social structures such as the one that exists at an art school.