Profile

Amy Houghton's practice involves the use of animation, video and porcelain to explore the hidden and revealed histories and stories related to old objects in particular old textiles and photographs placed in the context of our lives in the present. She explores how we use and read antique textiles and photographs as stimuli for nostalgic longing, as indicators of our authenticity, as tools to search for origin and as a connection to reality all in the context of contemporary society.

Amy's work involves pseudo forensic and archaeological processes to examine and reanimate, through stop frame and video animation, the textiles and photographs she collects. She animates the forensic process of unpicking garments and partial elements of photographs. She desires to access the photos’ and textiles’ stories and explore the seduction and impossibility of accessing the truth of the past through its attempted animation. These pieces are then presented on flat screens inserted into walls or back projected onto tables and light boxes. As well as trying to reanimate garments and photographs, another method of Amy's practice is to create 3D stills of textile objects by transforming textiles into porcelain. Here she freezes a moment in the life of fabric whereas in the video animations of photographs she reanimates part of an image that has already been captured at a specific point in time. Both of these expressions show us a presence of absence. Through this use of porcelain, antiques and video animation her practice is concerned with the shifting of tense and time.

Amy's use of porcelain and video animation once-removes the audience from the objects and invites questioning about their meaning and the time in which they exist. The use of new media places the historic objects that she uses in her practice firmly within the present, and the porcelain works are a reminder of the fragility and impermanence of time and of the beauty of being in the moment, offering an opportunity to pause within the fast pace of contemporary culture.

"The reason I am intrigued by and use antiques in my work is because of the nostalgia often associated with them. It seems to me that the nostalgic use of antiques is linked to our desire to defy our modern idea of time and the fast pace at which things shift and change. Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects describes our use of antiques in terms of nostalgic longing for another time. He says, ‘They are a way of escaping from everyday life, and no escape is more radical than escape from time, none so thoroughgoing as escape into one’s own childhood.’ So far my research has led me to believe that these objects play a part in authenticating who we are. They create a physical connection to the past, and because they are outside our sphere of objects that have a ‘use value’, they offer a pause in the fast pace of contemporary life, as well as a connection to a different pace of time associated with a nostalgic past. Antiques can offer a connection to a feeling of reality in a culture of manipulated imagery." Amy Houghton