Robert Fearns

About

Robert Fearns' drawings are overlaid with perforated images from cinema. In the Oil Spill series the images are from Battleship Potemkin, a film in which events at sea and on land are in tension. In this work, dramatic and visually iconic moments are 'flattened' with a slowly developing narrative. Oil spills provoke a particular response of contrasting emotions. The media coverage is usually of events unfolding slowly over extended time, from the initial drama, through the lingering death throes before sinking, to the wider environmental disaster. That moment of sinking embodies the moments between conflicting physical, emotional, or environmental states. The drawings are explorations into what might be thought of as a version of cinematic memory. Cinematic in the sense of montage, the use of screens - both as surfaces and as filters, the fictional representation of events and places experienced through different media, and through a structural manipulation of time.