The latest assignment called for by UCS was to produce a narrative based on a received email. I had received a thank you email from the renowned graphic artist Brian Grimwood for images I made of his private viewing opening night at the Waterfront Gallery, Ipswich.

My mind went into overdrive and I got to thinking how confused I am when I exit an exhibition with a catalogue of exhibits with numbers, titles and prices, but without images. I end up with just a jumbled mass of figures in my head.

I decided to photograph just the numbers of the exhibits and then use a computer program to generate theoretical viewing rates for each of the 66 exhibits. This was so that I would not influence the outcome. I based the calculations on 12 theoretical visits and calculated the number of times each image was viewed, then expressed that as a percentage. I applied that percentage to the opacity of each image that I stacked into one composite with 66 image layers.

The result was this:

I then contacted Brian Grimwood and asked him to participate by collaborating with me and provide a viewing order for his own works. He graciously did and this is the result:

Each image was printed at 90cm x 90cm.

What is interesting to me is that when Brian talked to me about my work he said that when he created an exhibition he sees it as one image, which is exactly what I had set out to do. Clearly we both see and leave an exhibition with one image in our heads.

The major influence for layering like this was Idris Khan, although many more people have applied this technique since Khan produced his work based upon the collective works of the Becher’s.