Katherine Hymers

Artist statement

Hymers work is as much an ongoing exercise in looking and perception as it is a persistent interrogation of time as it operates on that perception.

The work is primarily lens based, in video and photography. Hymers utilises the body throughout the work as a presence and a tool, often exposing herself within the work, choosing to be in front of as well as behind the camera, in an attempt to create an alternative proximity to reality perpetuated by metaphor in symbols and allegory whilst acknowledging the camera’s historical, temporal and perceptual impact on the discourses of representation. However, Hymers is more concerned with exposing the viewer’s awareness of his or her own perceptiveness, allowing this to take precedence over narrative or character in the work, instead creating scenes that hover between any specific time, place or genre, where narrative is compressed, compromised or suspended.

Hymers images oscillate between the still and the moving. This oscillation brings with it the implications of video and photography’s different spatial and temporal qualities; the work operates as an exchange between these categories and definitions, and in the consequent slippage and blur between, she hopes to cause the viewer to question their perception.

Whilst Hymers images remain crystallised, they do hold out a promise of narrative. The narrative is mediated by the viewer, as the subtle allusions to unrealised drama, expressed through both image and sound, and their interaction, enable them to transcend the constraints of the photographic frame and access what Barthes referred to as a ‘kind of subtle beyond’, that imagined space around the image which might contain the theatrical excess absent within it.

Temporality as a leitmotif is further heightened by carefully composed images constructed according to a finely tuned emotional and aesthetic vulnerability, using a vocabulary that assimilates formal and structural devices from an array of contemporary and historical languages. The fact that these devices are well known to us, and already part of a common visual culture, is integral to their subversive function within Hymers practice.