Floating Green Leaves (2012, 212MB, 3:52 min)

Diana Brighouse is a doctor turned artist in a grand tradition.
She’s currently completing an MA at the University of Chichester in the UK.
Her work is intensely thoughtful and thought through and also often very beautiful.
I’m not always keen on artist commentaries on their own work but what she sent
me is a model of clarity so I’ll reproduce it in full here.

‘The underlying stimulus for my work is to challenge the reductive philosophy
that prevails in Western society today.
I believe that reductionism is manifest through a prioritising of scientific
or quantitative methodology. An unquestioning belief in the measurable is
found not only in science and technology, but also in education, medicine
and politics.
I believe that the supremacy of the measurable can be directly related not
only to the political and financial threats to the arts, but also to the
regressive attitudes towards women and the disabled.
Successive postgraduate university educations in medicine, spirituality,
psychotherapy and art have repeatedly challenged the certainties I have
been taught.
My use of digital video (a quantitative binary process) to produce images
that I believe to be non-reductive reflects the paradoxes created by my
chosen professions.
There are multiple possible interpretations of the videos depending on
the background of the viewer. This is deliberate and hopefully supports
my non-reductive thesis.
These videos are part of a series investigating reflections; a second
series that I am also currently working on investigates shadows.
My intention is that this series will be more politically orientated.
My videos are taken in my garden and edited with Sony Vegas Platinum 11.0HD.’

We’ll have another of these beautiful works next week.