Susan Collins (b. 1964, London) has been recognised as a leader in the field of artists working with computers and electronic media in the UK, working with transmission, networks and time as her primary materials and exhibiting widely internationally. Awards for her work have included a Royal Society for the Arts Art for Architecture award for her collaboration with architect Sarah Wigglesworth on a Classroom of the Future; a BAFTA nomination for her Tate commission, Tate in Space, and a Society for Photographic Education (SPE) Garry B Fritz Imagemaker Award for her networked landscape works, Fenlandia and Glenlandia.
For Fenlandia a webcam was placed was placed 12 months from May 2004, on the roof of the Anchor Inn, a 17th century coaching inn in the heart of rural England, part of an area known as Silicon Fen overlooking the Great Ouse and the New Bedford River at Sutton Gault in Cambridgeshire, an area where technology is literally embedded in the flat horizons of a reclaimed landscape of canals, sluices, dykes and ditches. The webcam was programmed to record images a pixel a second, so that a whole image would be made up of individual pixels collected over 21.33 hours. Each image was collected from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal bands continuously.
The result is a series of gradually unfolding, landscape images harvested and archived over the course of the year. The work is intended to be slow, a reflection on the ever increasing speeds we demand from the internet. It encodes the landscape over time, with different tonal horizontal bands recording fluctuations in light and movement throughout the day and with broad bands of black depicting nighttime. Stray pixels appear in the image where a bird, person, car or other unidentifiable object may have passed in front of the webcam as the pixel was captured. Time becomes intrinsic to the work as the previous 76800 seconds or 21.33 hours – just under a day – is displayed pixel by pixel within a continuously updating time lapse film caught in a single frame. Poised between the still and the moving image, the lens and the pixel, the work explores how images can be coded and decoded using both light and time as building blocks for the work.
Public artworks have included In Conversation (1997-2001), shown in Brighton, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Cardiff, and Berlin, which linked viewers on the internet with pedestrians on the street; Underglow (2005-6), a network of illuminated drains for the Corporation of London and Brighter Later (2013), a site-specific light installation for the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford driven by live weather data.
View: Website
Since 2002 she has investigated the relationship of time to place and landscape through a series of year-long pixel by pixel internet transmissions from remote locations including Seascape (2009) a solo show for the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea; LAND (2017), a live transmission from Jerusalem looking across the West Bank towards the Jordanian mountains, Five Hours Later (2019) a simultaneous exchange between Sheffield, UK and Boston USA, And Current I and II (2020/2023) which placed a camera first above water and then below, from Aigio Old Port in the Greek Peloponnese. Dell Quay, commissioned for Pallant House Museum, Chichester in 2022 for the exhibition Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water, is (still) capturing the estuary seascape at Chichester Harbour from a camera placed on the roof of the Dell Quay Sailing Club.
The most recent in the series, Rising Tides, was commissioned for the Bangkok Art Biennale, BAB 2024: Nurture Gaia, and launched in October 2024. It will be exhibited as part of the Biennale at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) until February 25th 2025 and continue online until the end of the summer. Susan Collins is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London where she was the first female Slade Professor and Director (2010-18), Head of Research (2019-23) and where she established the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art (SCEMFA) in 1995.
Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Norwich School of Art for an online project and book, Silicon Fen, Fenlandia exists concurrently as a website; a networked full screen live transmission, and as a series of archival digital inkjet prints from the archive.
