Alter Ego Outing - more lines

Hello Simon here ...

I have not been around for a while - been busy you know.

Went down to London recently and found my favourite
- yes - black, yellow and lines.

Unusually for me I actually photographed a person.

See you again soon.

Simon

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Work by Line

Inspiration from the factory work by Peter Saville. He has been a big influence in the life of Joy Division/New Order and now me. These images consist of lines. They are the strongest images for me - they give me peace and tranquility. I like that there is no end to a line - particularly when cropped by my viewfinder.

Be back soon

Simon



The Alter Ego is born

Simon Hollowstone:

Simon was born in 1972 in Manchester.

He missed the punk era but his parents were very much into it.

He grew up around punks, Mohawk hair, safety pins, tattoos, studs and loud music.

He didn’t like it.

He, like most of us, thought his parents uncool.

The 80’s produced the most awful music and one day whilst looking through his parent’s record collection he found:

Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division

His life was transformed forever.

He understood the lines – he loved the music.

It gave him freedom to express himself in a way that he had never realised he could.

He could be a conformist rebel.

As an artist Simon creates work that includes lines.

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The Alter Ego is conceived

Inspiration

I was inspired by a piece in the show created by Haroon Mirza – a complex audio-visual installation assembled out of domestic furniture, electronic equipment and lights. Regaining a Degree of Control, was created for BAS7 and uses previously unseen footage of Ian Curtis, the post-punk band Joy Division’s songwriter, lyricist and singer.

Curtis’s song ‘She’s Lost Control (1978) concerns a girl with epilepsy, a condition that Curtis himself suffered from and to which the strobe light in Mirza’s installation refers. Here , as in much of Mirza’s work, the central proposition is about transforming noise into sound, and making hearing and listening as important and relevant as seeing and looking. His aim, he says, is to ‘explore visual and acoustic space as one sensorial mode of perception’.

I did not like the fact that Haroon had stapled the vinyl record Unknown Pleasures – however I could see why it had been done because it was creating a noise as it rotated on turntable. I love the album and the logo that was created for it by Peter Saville as suggested by the drummer Stephen Morris. The lines are the sound wave pulses from the first pulsar discovered PSR B1919+21. There is not track information the only way to tell the difference between ‘side1’ and ‘side 2’ was that the logo appeared reversed.   

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Finding your inner writer

Wayne Burrows set us a task when we met him at Nottingham Contemporary... to view the exhibits in the British Arts Show 7 and let a piece of work or artist inspire us to create a story.

The story then needed to be about the artist - real or imagined - or about the piece and how that inspires us. Finally for the following week we needed to produce a piece of work that this fictional person had created.

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