Kenneth F Yates United Kingdom

Back to profiles

I work in the medium of film/video and photography. I studied photography before going on to study fine art at Leeds where I specialised in video art. As a filmmaker I've made creative films for Screen Yorkshire and North West Vision in England. My photographs have been exhibited online and in galleries, both in the UK and internationally.

Video and photography is a technical medium relying on technology but I have a analogue attitude to digital tech and mix analogue and digital together either by using old film cameras, or in my video work making extensive use of family super 8 footage or old photographs. Similarly, I use modern digital video in an analogue way - with interference, glitches and 'mistakes'. I want to make the viewer aware of the process, and in particular temporal existence - time. Film/video is essentially made of moments and a photograph is a freeze frame frozen moment. Time and how we experience it has become an important theme for me. I am also a writer interested in narrative and so my works are usually part of a photographic series, or a series of videos - a series of different narratives.

'Crepuscular Glass' This series explores the intersection between realism and abstraction in photography in trying to create with glass and light an analogue of abstract painting in a photographic image. Can a photograph be an abstraction if it depicts a real object? Do we make abstractions of the world ourselves? I'm Interested in discovering elements of abstraction in the 'real' everyday world.

'Chronopolis' Is an ongoing photographic series (25 years and counting) set in and around the city of Leeds using architectural clocks to tell the time of the city. The theme is time and how we experience it. Do people bother to check the time from buildings anymore? Even so the clocks continue, time doesn't stop. Some of the viewpoints in these images no longer exist, some of the buildings have already gone. Time has moved on.

'Wasteland' Can rubbish be aesthetic, beautiful even? These images are about challenging and acknowledging waste. We have a complex Frankenstein-like relationship with waste - we create it, then deny it. In photographing waste I endeavour to make the images as aesthetically pleasing as possible, in doing so I am aware that I'm transforming something that has no value and according it artistic value. Yet what is worse, I think, is ignoring the waste that blights our urban spaces and renders it invisible. My approach is to confront waste and make it visible, even monumental.