Lloyd Godman - Interviews - CURRICULUM VITAE - © Lloyd Godman

Questions and Interviews.

Questions from Natasha Williams 2012

What age were you when you first decided that being an artist was a passion of yours and made you want to become an artist?

Probably quite young - 10 to 12 when I had a box of paints and when to a Saturday painting class, but it seemed like an impossible dream. So I ended up doing science and electrical engineering. During the time I spent 5 years doing an electrical apprenticeship I enviously watched a few friends walk off to  art school every morning  past where I worked - so the dream was still in my heart, but it was not until I was about 25 that things changed and  the possibility of being an artist seemed real - by 32  when I had a job as technician at the Art School in Dunedin, at this time, I was struck with the fact that  the art game was on!

You worked quite a lot with light (2007) what inspired you to do this?

The fundamental force of photograph is light, studying and understanding the mysteriousness of light was key. The difference between how we see and how the camera sees. The Body Symbol project taught me to see light and dark not a subject.

How did you come up with this idea?

In 1989 through the Codes of Survival project,  I began combining photographs with photograms and light became more important than a scene to photograph, this continued to develop through  Adze to Coda, Evidence from the Religion of Technology and Aporian Emulsions.  The historical processes used in Aporian Emulsions stimulated me to research the first roots of photography and this led to my discovery of Archimedes noting photosensitivity and Aristotle noting the concept of a pinhole  camera. I had been engaged in growing plants from 1973 and in 1995 I made the connection that plants are an abstract from of photography, in that they use light to grow. In 1996 I commenced an MFA growing images into the leaves of Bromeliads and this led to installations with these plants where I suspended them and projected light through the space to create shadow images on tissue paper screens in projects like enlighten. Over time I also began experimenting with work like the Carbon Obscura were there was only light, but the rays of light manifested through thousands of pinhole cameras.

 
It looks like a lot of work how did you manage to complete so many designs?

I was a competitive swimmer till the age of 15 - the training is insane, 3 times a day 7 days a week, up down up down the same grotty white tiles. I am sure I witnessed them crack. No wonder the freedom of surfing was a revelation. I began surfing when I was 15 and still get in every chance I can.

But the swimming taught me to focus.

In terms of my art - just focus and discipline - more engagement in the work than pursuing a star status.  For me the work is a form of self discovery. Foremost I make it for my personal journey - exhibitions, publications come later.

In fact a lot of the work has never been shown in galleries -  in 1992 the web was born by the end of 1995 I was documenting my work on the web. A web site is a 24/7 gallery. Now more people see work on the web than in galleries. So projects like Summer Solstice and DiVision have never been exhibited in galleries. At present they just exist in a virtual space.

Are there artists in other fields that inspire you?

 Well there have been many for different reasons, Man Ray, Bill Brant, Bill Viola, Anthony McColl, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy, Dan Harvey Heather Ackoyrd, Colin McCahon

Did you take any sort of art/photography at school, was it always an option for a career?

 Apart from the painting class.....No! My electrical apprentice was based at a news paper and I would sneak into the darkroom to work at the lunch hours. Some of the photographers encouraged me, other wanted to keep me out.  There were few courses in photography in the 1970s  so in the late 1970s I completed a Dip of Photography from the USA - correspondence -  it took 3 years and was actually very rewarding  - I still have the course info today. I wondered if it was genuine, so I submitted a dud assignment: they sent it back said it was crap and made me resubmit. That was my quality control.

What have you learnt as a photographer that you can share with other aspiring artists/photographers?

If you don't believe in yourself and your ideas you can't expect others to. Expect others to challenge and  influence your ideas but not kill them off - this is a natural and healthy part of artistic evolution. So don't take criticism, or rejection of your work personally. Remember you are creating this firstly for you. Your vision and life journey is unique to you  - photography and other creative mediums are a mean of unlocking the mysteries of the journey, keep it within as a precious heart beat.  Some work that I have created takes 10 years or more for people to pick up on it and understand it. In the meantime I keep exploring and moving on. So work like the plant work - the photosynthetic images etc. that was created in 1996-8 curators are just picking up on it now. When you find someone who begins to understand your work, treasure their support. For instance Stephanie Britton Editor of  Artlink picked up on my work in 2005 and has been a great encouragement and support, we have become good friends and catch whenever we can.

How would you personally describe your style?

lateral,  evolutionary and elusive.


What are the key themes behind your photos?

In one form or another the work has always had an environmental underpinning. The new plant work aims to move from art as critical comment to art as action. The work is super sustainable where the only maintenance is to harvest the work every 3 years to make a new work. No other medium offers this.

Do your photos look how you originally envisioned?

 As my skills progressed and my mood swung this changed  -the work changes. I also like when the process intervenes and incidents and accidents play a part.

Are there other artists that you share ideas with?

 Yes I like to sound ideas off others -  I have a close group of friends where I live at the Baldessin Press and also other artists I work in collaboration with -  these might be writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, dancers, even IT people and scientists. That's is why I value working in collaboration. Other artist friends have no idea what I am doing, the work is perplexing for them. But we are still friends.


What environment are you most comfortable working in?
At the moment the green house or nature -  but at present I am working on a project at PICA Perth with a project director and 2 other artists in an urban environment  - and it is really cool. So a Taoist approach is good  - just be open to the opportunities, a space is a space, and any space is a creative space  if you want it to be.


What’s your most proudest achievement?
The last thing I did, but also the simplest - the world's only super sustainable suspended double rotating garden, atmocycle, why did I not think of this years ago!


who supports you?
 Many friends have supported me. Alex Syndikas at RMIT, has always helped. Silvi Glattauer, Tess Edwards and Rob Hails at the Baldessin Press, are close by.
Helen McDonald Melbourne Uni, Stephanie Britton,  Gavin Keeny of Deakin Uni, often open the work up through a theoretical perspective.
Alex Hayes, Matt Blackwood to name a few.

But lately there has been much more recognition of the work and things are much easier.

Does your upbringing show through your art work? why/why not?

 Well in terms of the narcissistic stuff - like all of us there are probably a few things I could get hung up on and base all my  work on - but its water under the bridge and I try to focus on the journey not the departure points.

Like light, stuff leaks in. Like in 2005 when I found some old negs on the ground under the house I had lived in for 28 years - I was fascinated with how the image had disintegrated to nothing but dust. I was interested in how the light that had activated the silver was also gone.  I printed what remained on the negs, basically dirt  in a series called When Light Turns to Dust  -  I thought this was what the work was about. This was the year that my long standing marriage broke up and I moved to Australia, so later I read it as a metaphor for this turn in the road but it took a few years to realize this. When the light of love turns to dust. There are other reference points as well.



What is the most insane thing you’ve ever done?

In 1973 - 4 I lived in a 3 storied tree house on the Island of Kauai, Hawaii, on Elizabeth Taylor's Brothers land, and surfed every day. Surfed huge waves that year on an air mat.

What was it like when you first got published?
That was back about 1968 in a News paper  - getting published then was a big deal and much different than now. The last big feature was in FM mag cover, double spread and 6 pages, that was a real buzz.

What materials do you use to create your designs/photos?

Over many decades I have experimented and used many materials, film from 12 ISO Tech Pan, HP5 400 ISO rated at 1800 ISO, colour transparency film  up rated and developed as negs, 35mm, 120 roll film, 4x5 and 8x10 sheet film. A wide range of B&W photographic papers mainly fibre based, colour print papers, alternative processes - cyanotype Van Dyke Brown. And of course the leaves of plants to grow photograms into.

What do you want your audience to get from your photographs?
I don't see the work having a fundamental message, more a theme. I do not see a work or series as being set in rapid set concrete.  Because everybody comes to the work with a different life experience, I like to leave it open to them. Like a garden they can take what path they want to, smell and pick what flowers attract them, taste elements they see as fruits.
 In fact I feel enriched when someone sees something I had not seen in the work, it opens it up further and adds another dimension, the work gains more life.  They can take what they want from the work, but like anything the more you study something the more you get to understand the possible meanings it might offer, and what the artist was intending. In our visually chaotic  world where we are bombarded with so much visual art we don't slow down enough to actually "look" at things. We have lost the art of visual meditation, contemplation, yet this is exactly what an artist expects an audience will do. So the answer for many viewers going to a gallery rely on a didactic panel, or a sound narration on an Ipod to tell them what the work is about, they are never really asked their interpretation of the work.  Whenever I have left a comments book the words surprise me  - like this one from the first Carbon Obscura  Sarah (7yrs) said the light streaming thru was like violin strings!

However if someone commits to buy a work then they often find the time to unlock it.

What has been the most challenging series of photos for you?
Various series posed different challenges for different reasons. So rather than staying with a set formula I always seem to ask the question "what if", and that inevitably leads to a challenge. I have never been one to stay with the formula and popularize it for the rest of my life. Many artists find this the optimum model, you can look at the work over 20 years and it hardly moves an inch: but I am not one of these.
 The Entropy work is a good example.
It quickly grew into a huge archive of digital images shot as disjointed triptychs.  Over 26 trips into the bush over 2 years to photograph the regeneration after the fire I had this massive resource. So the question arose how will I deal with this?
 This is where the idea of the huge composites of 900 - 1200 images evolved and the infinite  random projection came from.  I had to work with Alex Hayes to get the IT aspect happening where he wrote the app in C++. First he did it in java but it was not smooth enough. So he had to work with a new computer language he had never used before which took more  time than we had planned for. We were aiming for the opening of the show on a Sunday, but because there was so much interest in the show they decided to open the gallery to the public  to the Friday.

Testing the work the night before the exhibition opening at TarraWarra it crashed and was playing white squares by the morning. We had a few frantic hours fixing bugs in the code while the gallery director was getting more impatient by the minute.  It was looking crazy and tight. I got the work installed and operating perfectly with 10mins to spare. It was the only work like this (the other work was all 2D  and 3D) in the show and was a huge success, so the risk paid off.  Because it was a digital computer work, the composites only existed in low resolution digital files. So for a later exhibition at the Australian Centre of photography, where we decided to install huge prints, as well as the projection,  I had to take screen grabs and recreate the mosaic. This meant opening  about 1,000 images in photoshop and placing them on the screen garb template for each print - the file sizes got up to nearly 2GB which did interesting things to the speed of the computer. So the exhibition at ACP was equivalent to a show of about 3,000 images.

One of my favourite is the Nimbus- Images of angels, what inspired you to do this?
Where they any specific headstones?

 This came from a colleague  suggesting that there were so many students around the world shooting in cemeteries that it was doubtful that any artist could create work that was new. By chance, the same night I was walking by a cemetery with my camera and a flash, so I wandered in the gate. Actually it was the same cemetery that features in the film sequence of the film "Goodbye Pork Pie". Inside I was confronted by a huge 2m tombstone of an angel with a finger pointing to the heavens, so I set up the tripod and lit the shot with the flash. The black background gave so much to the image. From there I discovered more angels in the same cemetery and photographed these also. Then more cemeteries, and more angels, and so it goes on. I have never got to refine or finish this work. But it the process of researching the winged human motif, I did discover that angels are manifestations of light, so in a strange way it does connect to other work. Perhaps one day I will get to work on this more.