General Effects

She saw great chair legs rearing up into the sunlight; she saw the shadowed undersides of their seats spread above her like canopies ... she saw the terraced cliffs of the stairs, mounting up into the distance, up and up ... And all the time, in the stillness, the clock spoke ... measuring out the seconds.

Mary Norton, The Borrowers

General Effects (2006) is the second stage of a four-year project documenting my grandmother's house in the years leading up to her death and its subsequent sale. She was a practical woman who appreciated the intrinsic value of objects and kept or recycled most things. In the later years of her life she sold antiques, and many of the outer rooms of the house were filled with the surplus from auction lots and bric-a-brac she was waiting to sell or repair. This stage of the project, created as her movements were becoming increasingly restricted by emphysema, presents a darker and more fragmented view of her house, including the parts she could no longer reach or maintain; attics and corridors where piles of quilts or an old trunk waited in dusty silence, like artefacts in the storerooms of a museum. Here at the edges of the house, objects of no particular value were arranged by default rather than by design, sheltered, but only just, from the encroaching elements.

By swapping a still camera for a moving one, the video element of General Effects is an attempt to unfreeze the process and stretch the possibilities of the fixed

photographic image, to investigate what goes on in an empty room during the seconds of a long exposure. Little happens in this looking-glass world, apart from the slight sway of a curtain or the sudden entrance of a fly, but without these tiny movements how would we know that time is passing at all? While photographs lock time into an unrepeatable past, moving images trap it in a perpetual present. This makes the silent stillness of the house seem endless; recording it was like hoarding time.