Aaron Claringbold

Art

  1. What can I say without touching the earth with my hands?
  2. A litany of violence and excess
  3. Leisuretime 1
  4. Hero(es)
  5. Here’s what we know

Also Art

  1. Bogong High Plains
  2. One hundred dredged channels
  3. You can’t live inside an image 
  4. STRAY VOLTAGE
  5. Confluence

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You can’t live inside an image of a place. 

This work was breifly shown as part of a small exhibiton To Pitch a tent, to pull it back down, at The Mission to Seafarers in Melbourne in May 2023, alongside works from the other memebr of B4HC – Jack Mitchell, Eliki Read, and Rebecca McCauley.

This was the first video work I have filmed  holding the camera myself (aside from a collaborative high school media project). I borrowed a 16mm black and white camera from a friend to experiment while on residency at Garambi Baan. I found something really beautiful in both the aethetics and the format. The materiality of phyical and limited rolls of film gave me a parameter – there was something very freeing in the idea of removing of the editing proces. I decided to show rolls of film just as I had shot them, reducing the scope for directorial descision making to the moment of encounter with the world. I didn’t really plan the content, as much as just considering my surroundings at the time of making. I shot one roll at Garambi Baan / Laughing Waters (on the Birrarung a bit out of the city) and one roll around the Birrarung and KooyongKoot/Gardiners Creek. The video work is two BW 16mm rolls shown in their entirerty back to back. 







The work was installed on a rear projection screen mounted on an ad hoc wooden frame with a black border embroidered with a range of naive drawings relating to the video. Alongside the video work I provided an un synced audio recording, running at a similar length to the video. This was playing on headphones with an extra long cord at a distance from the projection screen. The audio is a slightly slowed down recording of me speaking out a kind of diary entry similarly to how I write notes, but a bit more performative. It is a self reflective rumination on the video work and it’s intentions, and my life at the time of making it. It attempts some clumsy and heavy handed poetics and is perhaps quite of the moment (for me). 



When I think of the sacred I think or somewhere out or the way. Likely a thicket or bushes, maybe
a few old trees on a creek or in a little depression by the highway. Maybe somewnere like this
under a bridge, or a valley where you can see the city. You can always hear so well in these
places.