Art I like - Susan Collins

I encountered the work of Susan Collis by chance at the De La Warr pavilion in Bexhill in 2009 - a show called Seascape. It took me a while to understand what she's doing, but now it's very relevant for my "journey lines" project.

As her work builds up, each pixel is a moment in time. I do the same, in a less discrete way - ie, with less separation of individual moments - while writing my lines: each line represents the duration of a journey, so each point along the line represents a moment in time. This is present time for the writer; past time for the viewer.

Collins' work is described thus: "Susan Collins' gradually unfolding, classically romantic landscape images are harvested and archived over the course of the year. They encode the landscape over time, with different tonal horizontal bands recording fluctuations in light and movement throughout the day and with broad bands of black depicting night-time. Stray pixels appear in the image where the moon passes through or a bird, person, car or other unidentifiable object passes in front of the webcam as the pixel is captured. The work is intended to be slow, a reflection on the ever increasing speeds we demand from the internet. Poised between the still and the moving image, the lens and the pixel, the prints explore how images can be coded and decoded using both light and time as building blocks for the work."

The picture above has been "written" over a number of hours, pixel by pixel, and transmitted from the site of the camera to the site of the screen, miles away. The pixels build up line by line - the light on the water is thus not the light from the sky, because the sky was written earlier. Once the screen is filled, the pixels start at the top again - hence the darkness, because by this time the sky is dark. A wonderful way of bringing the past and present together, and making us pay attention to the invisible workings of a medium we take for granted.