Emma Donaldson: Selected Works

Overview

The work enquires into the way we as subjects engage with public space. The works to date have been autobiographical investigations into the idea of identity and its construction in urban space that is on the one hand familiar, and on the other hand under continual reconstruction. Central to my work is a belief that it is things other than the built environlnt that effect our sense of time and place. These are contingent upon a sense of ones own self awareness. By self awareness, I mean the conscious knitting together of disparate multi-layered information as, for example, what is brought about when the body moving through different spaces engages with remembered events, processes of recognition and the occurrences of new events.

Tst #3 USA documents a thirty day travel journey by train across America during 2001. The project aimed to make a photographic account of the journev that began in Philadelpi'a and ended in Seattle. As the trip progressed, I became less preoccupied by the fixture of the cities visited and more aware of the fleeting consistency of travel. A sense of ti'me and place was recognised only momentarily by way of an identification with a particular situation and subsequent projection into place. These situations emerged through conversations with people encountered along the journey, the way a setting and its organisational layout would trigger off earlier experiences in other pilaces Or the familiar tune of a mobile phone ringing. The journey became a montage of remembered events from previous visits to America, smells and specific street scenes mirroring What has already been seen on television - so much so that it becomes difficult to tell if place is reality or fiction.

Many of the images used in Tst #3 USA were taken from inside train carriages whilst travelling from one city to the next. A voice-over accompanying these projections functions a dialogue, and considers the routine of travel as well as the act of rememberance.

Emma Donaldso