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Francis Gomila's residency at Kielder considered the nature of the place and its relationship to the outside world. The films that he produced included a documentary on the daily life of a forestry stalker, digitally manipulated video musing on the experience of watching continued civil unrest in Iraq via television from this remote community, and a road movie detailing the journey of a stag beetle from Kielder to a tower block in Newcastle city centre. Gomila also developed a series of proposals that reflected on the 'manufactured' nature of the Kielder landscape and featured domestic items such as flat pack furniture and light fittings re-assigned and re-scaled to become sculptures sited in Kielder's environment.
Francis Gomila has explored video as a sculptural medium throughout a career spanning twenty years. In his words, 'In my view video adequately articulates Duchamp's infra-thin (the space between two sides of a single sheet of paper) enabling a permeable boundary, through which video can become sculpture in its own right.' Time-based installations, photographic and video works have all contributed to an extraordinary body of work comprising multi-media installations and interventions in public places both in the UK and abroad.
Gomila employs increasingly sophisticated mechanisms to imperceptibly draw the spectator in to his preoccupations, and, as such, is interested in the tensions and possible dialogues between the spectator and the artwork, and in the psychological, social and cultural aspects of this relationship. His video installations generate a psychological tension between the artwork and the spectator in exploring the levels of conflict between the image, the social context and the architectural environment in which it is placed/displaced and exhibited.
Further information about the artist.
