Fiona Long Art

Multi media installation.
1996
www.fionalongart.co.uk
The idea started from a photograph I took of a very old church when I
was on holiday in Kephalonia, one of the Ionian Greek islands. The
photo was of a window where some of the panes of glass were broken,
some were frosted some were reflective in a pearlescent wat and some
were see through. I thought it looked beautiful and interesting. This
led me to think about windows and how there are different things you
can do with it to alter vision. The refraction of light through glass
can alter the way we see things, angles and colours. I find vision
perception very interesting especially in visual art and there are so
many sayings about eyes and vision it is obviously a rather evocative
subject as well as being highly scientific. (I also like science.)

The first thing I did was to go to an architectural salvage yard.
Because we have lots of old buildings in England, people make a living
out of getting old period features like doors and fire places out of
old buildings that are being modernised or knocked down. Then other
people who have old houses which have had the fire places taken out or
even new houses but want to put antique fittings into them, go to the
architectural salvage yard and buy them there. This is usually much
cheaper than getting replicas made. It is a great form of recycling. I
found these Victorian sash windows there. I got them for £5 each. As
you can see they were in a dreadful state but I rather liked the
peeling paint. They had some vinyl frosting stuck to the back of some
of the panes and that reminded me of the church I saw in Greece that
had different effects in each pane of glass. This frosting had gone
all yellowy-brown with age and was crumbling and peeling off which I
thought also added to the texture and interest of the thing rather
like the paint did.

Then after cleaning the windows off a little, I set to work on the
rest of it. I took lots of photographs of peoples eyes at school. I
took photos of people with glasses or pulling there eyes in strange
ways. I then did drawings of these photos and cut up the photos and
did little collages with them. The panel I call "eye soup" which is
bottom centre left of the optics panel, involved me cutting up and
collaging lots of my eye photos and then photocopying it. I then did
drawing with a black pen onto this to unify the image and hide any
sharp lines that I had made with the scissors. For the silhouettes at
the sides in the seeing eye to eye panel I took a photograph of the
profile of one of my friends an then cut the profile out of black
paper.

I also photocopied a thesaurus on the pages about vision. (like a big
dictionary that tells you words and phrases with similar meanings). I
also took photocopies of my old physics exercise book with diagrams of
the refraction of light and formuli for the speed of light etc and a
biology text book with a scientific diagram of an eye.

For a lot of the text, I got a bottle of ink and held it quite high in
the air above a sheet of paper on the ground before writing words like
visualisation or "Window of the soul" with the ink flowing loosely in
order to make attractive splatters. I did the Optics writing in the
same way but then I photocopied it and moved it over the glass while
it was making the copy which makes it look stretched. I wrote an eye
for an eye in the smallest writing that I could and then enlarged it
several times over on the photocopier to give it an interesting
graininess. Then I moved this in the photocopier too which is why it
looks particularly stretched at the bottom.

Then when I had gathered all this stuff together, I photocopied it all
onto acetate slides. These are the transparent sheets that they put in
over head projectors at school. I cut them up and trimmed them to size
and arranged them over the windows. I then attached them to the
windows with spray mount ( a type of spray on glue). Many of the words
and images appear in the work twice because of double vision.

One of the last things I had to do was to attach the windows, one on
top of the other and then make a big stand for them out of wood. I
painted the stand white a three years ago for an exhibition this piece
went into and rigged up some lights behind it.

I did this piece as part of my A Level in art. I was 17 years old when
I made it. When I took it out of school which required a big truck
(Ute) from my Dad's company, it went into the board room at my Dad's
office for several years. It got some funny looks from the various
conservative business men who saw it who weren't expecting such an
unusual piece of art work! It was good there because it had a big
window behind it to let the light through. It then lived in our dining
room for a while and then I took it to London when I moved there. I
put it infront of a window again and it's amazing the way you can see
different layers of it in different lights at different times of day.