ARTIST STATEMENT BY SARAH HICKSON
It was a blustery March day. Clouds sped across the sky, shifting and shaping the light. Deep shadows appeared, and then dissolved, as quickly as they had come. I was visiting Hull for the first time - with London Artists Projects and Back to Ours – to take photographs during the making of a short promotional film for the Truth to Power Café.
Truth to Power Café, created by Jeremy Goldstein and directed by Jen Heyes, is a live performance event mixing memoir, image, poetry, music and live testimony from participants speaking truth to power. I take portraits of the participants, which are then projected onto a large screen during the live event. My intention is to capture empathetic images that add poignancy to the personal testimonies.
The short film, directed by Jen Heyes, features Jeremy Goldstein and ten Hull residents, who are all members of the Hub at Back to Ours. The scenario for the film contained my gaze, creating the framework within which I could explore fragments of narrative as they played out against the landscape of the city. Henry Woolf’s poetry, spoken by Jeremy, was my internal soundtrack:
“You’ve got to slide between the living and the dead. Open up a window in your head.”
I ignored the clutter of expectation in my mind, and observed what appeared in that window in my head. It’s often the frayed edges of a story that draw my attention - where vulnerability and ambiguity reside, where threads from the past unravel in the present. I looked for glances that might slip by unnoticed, for emotional exchanges, and moments of fragility.
What emerged was an intimate photographic response to people and place – in dialogue with the Truth to Power Café and the film. I like to think that these images represent something of the spaces in-between. There’s an acknowledgement of melancholy and longing, but also of hope, in this visual ode to the city.
Sarah Hickson, April 2019