Olivia Punnett

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When I started my residency I began with an Over Head Projector, projecting from an old dried hydrangea head hung on its arm. The visual effects of the projector itself were as much what I was projecting as the image from the old flower head. Colour is coming only from the OHP. I was also thinking about reflection itself and how reflection can be a metaphor for memory. An OHP projection (as appose to a digital one) is a reflection because it’s the image bounced up to a mirror and then to the wall. I wanted to emphasize this again, so have ordered a paper print to mirror the projected image. The reflected image is less strong, more transparent and uncertain. Therefor I intend to flip this and have the OHP image on the wall and the artificial ‘reflected’ floor image on paper, a more tangible strong material image. This is purely to play with the idea of the phenomenology of reflection itself. The blurry image seems to swim up to the surface and is ambivalent. The fact that it came from a flower head is no longer really relevant.     The other image I have chosen to work on is a medium format photo I took, which is again ambivalent, you can see its something natural, leaves or grass or trees. But it sits on the line between abstract and representational. Where abouts on that line I do not know. How this image is seen is the

Where are you based? I am based in Haarlem Artspace in Wirksworth How did your artwork start out? I started working site specifically around 2011. I had been in art education at various points before that, and had read ‘The Poetics of Space’ By Bechelard on my first degree, and this informed my responses to place. I don’t work in this way now as much now but it was definitely my way in.   How do you get ideas for each piece of work? I have a set of central concerns, drawing inspiration from natural ephemera, and exploring the photochemical mark are two. I am a print maker and use photographs in that process often, taking medium format film photos myself and then choosing from the images I have which to take forward into printmaking processes. I then have ideas about ways of presenting these images, and how I would like people to perceive the images. These often mimic reflection, or I try to achieve this, often with mirrors. I play with these set-ups until they form a good position. How do you go about transforming an idea like that into a piece of art? Play is my main tool, I give myself lots of photos, prints or equipment to play with and test out different combinations of them. The blurred or washed over effect of an image that has passed through an imperfect lens translates, to me, to the recalled or remembered image.