My work focuses on the exploration of detail via intuitive composition, extended field recording techniques and photography.
Elements such as sonic architecture, audible silence and compositional arcs have evolved from my need to remain open to my emotive, intuitive response to situations and environments.
Jo Ray, Viewing platform, 2004
In performance and installation, my work aims to re-focus the attention of the audience on the overlooked and the simple nature of our surrounding inspirations – to capture the joyful and passionate, essential, powerful, minute and massive nearness of the objects and events that affect us.
—Jez riley French
I am curious about how we currently value, occupy and dream about space.
A playful examination of our relationship to space has always been intrinsic to my work.
By employing a playful approach to scale, objects and place, I attempt to address conventions of viewing and value systems. My hope is to raise a moment of doubt, and to create an awareness of how we perceive the world.
I try to engage the viewer in a certain way...something akin to a childlike exploration. This has been attempted by various means, from construction of micro-architectural ’viewing platforms’ to interventions in cities and the countryside.
Work at Skolska open will form part of a new investigation into illusory space.
The screen space, the reflection, the dream space, the fairy tale, the mirage all are symptoms of our need for an elsewhere, an other. A space for wonder, play and uncertainty.
I make structures that have physical and poetic potential, things that can act as landscape and architecture, view and view finder simultaneously.
Situations in which the illusory space can be preserved or shattered depending on the interaction of the viewer will evolve intuitively in response to the space and materials that can be sourced.
—Jo Ray
