Niki Gandy is a Staffordshire-based interdisciplinary artist, fusing material elements of film, photography, ambient light and mark-making to conduct meditative inquiries into human relationships with space, place and time. Exploring the intrinsic links between these experiential rubrics, Gandy’s work reveals them as participatory, sensory and highly subjective constructs.
Through adaption of the historic into alternative photographic processes her work combines elements of painterly or drawing practices and film combined with performance to examine how Slow Arts practice can contribute to a greater understanding of individual perceptions of time, duration and temporality.
Gandy’s performative photographic practice, provides documentary artefacts of experienced time and labour, with time itself continuing to generate impact long after the process of making ceases.
Inspired by the Zen philosophy of Ichigo Ichie, that one must embrace this very moment, unburdened by experiences of the past or the uncertainties of the future, her work commemorates the futility of the human preoccupation with the need to preserve or reclaim time, examining the paradox of the present having already become the past.
The works emerge from the epicentre of a period of life-altering loss and a deep-seated longing for a prior existence, revisiting, undoing and reconstructing nondescript domestic moments in a bid to overcome the frustrations of our limitations in time and memory.