Kitty Reford

My work is a commentary on diverse aspects of the environment I live in and encounter on a day to day basis. Part of the nature of that environment that I find particularly interesting is the way that technology has speeded up peoples lives, cramming their awareness with images and experiences, and ever more opportunities and devices to record them. I work across different media, including painting, print and video. I am interested in combining media. In recent years I have increasingly used photography, as an efficient way of capturing the plethora of experience I encounter. Clearly the use of photography is inherent in the film/video process, and I also use it often within the print process. I rarely use a photograph directly, but find ways to use its qualities as part of the work. The information and interest that comes from working with photographs is completely different than with drawing. The photograph reveals information about its own surface and its own peculiar language, (a chemical language historically, and still a language of light and dark and characteristically static shapes). As part of my concern with the environment, and particularly the ever moving buzz of the city I'm in, I'm interested in how my work relates back to its origins. This can lead to the same work being shown and experienced in different ways in different contextual situations. At present I see the future development of my work engaging more in my interest in ways of recording and transferring both still and moving imagery; and in the use of found imagery. Found both in the sense of using images from the internet, the press, etc, and also in the sense of using imagery not necessarily significant to me on a personal level, but simply as part of a collection, or archive of the hundreds of pictures that pass through my consciousness each day. This approach to image making is parallel to the instant accessibility and transferability of images and other information that exists in our current technological society. So I respond to my surroundings, but also to the process I am using, whether it is print, drawing, painting or film. A narrative unfolds and becomes believable through the process of working. In print, the process of transparent layering of shape and colour creates new situations, suggestions and tones that inform the story. The process of making a print , or a painting, can be like listening to a story on the radio, engaged in process, doing something with a distinct agenda, and suddenly another scene is there.