Until 1998, I worked in a range of media including interactive digital media, video, installation, painting, photography and collage/montage. My work was centrally concerned with the fate of the Utopian promises of modernism and modernity, referring to early twentieth century avant-garde practices and 1950s design. Since 1998, I have become increasingly interested in documenting aspects of everyday experience. The images still reference avant-garde work as well as other historical visual practices, but these references have become less specific and more embedded in the work. The photographs shown here are a small selection from a large series of photographs entitled ‘Sleep’ and produced over a period of eight years.
The photographs are taken during times of interrupted sleep, when I was pregnant, and now living with young children. I set out to undermine my own conscious control of the images, by forcing myself to take photographs when I was dropping in and out of sleep.
The photographs show a fairly narrow world, the same spaces and furnishings appear repeatedly. Living with young children restricted my ability to walk out of the house or travel any distance without telling anyone. For insomniacs, the night may be a lonely time, but for me there is sometimes pleasure in this solitude. At night, the familiar world becomes unfamiliar, sometimes enchanted, sometimes unnerving.
Making this work enabled me to find a new way of taking photographs that was more closely tied to my own nightly experience. Until now, and still during the day, I photograph with a 35mm film camera. However, these pictures are all taken with a digital camera with a smaller lens and comparatively low resolution. The camera is often also the light source for the image (using the flip-out LCD). It allows for greater depth of field and gives the images a grainy quality. Some of the first photographs in the project were made on a very early Casio digital camera which gives them a strange sculptural appearance. The images are finished in Photoshop, but not heavily manipulated. The ‘flaws’ – such as the grain and the white spots caused by long exposures – are important, a digital-photographic equivalent to the effects of sleeplessness on perception, perhaps. I also write on photography, cultural theory and exhibitions. My other recent photographic work includes a series of photographs of natural history museums.
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Michelle Henning was born in Shepton Mallet, Somerset in 1967. She studied fine art and art history at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, in 1986-9, and did an MA in the social history of art at Leeds University. She is currently senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
Between 1990 and 1998 her exhibitions included Wingwalkers (with Rebecca Goddard) at Watershed Media Centre, Bristol, 1998 – 1999; and Stories for the Red at Heart at Prema Arts Centre, Gloucestershire, 1995. Her work was included in Reflective Mechanisms at the F-stop gallery, Bath, 1995; in City Limits, at Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent in 1996; and in Telling Tales a touring exhibition by the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 1994-5.
Her work has been shown at festivals including Rootless ’97, in Kingston Upon Hull, and the Birmingham International Film and TV festival in 1996. It is discussed in Meskimmon, M. Engendering The City, Scarlet Press 1997 and included on the CD-rom From Silver to Silicon, published in 1994. In 1997, she was awarded The JA Clark Bursary for Creative Work in New Media to produce Wingwalkers. In 2000, a British Academy Small Research Grant enabled her to research and photograph natural history museums.
Since 1998, she has worked on a long-term photography project, Sleep, to be exhibited in 2006. Her writing is included in various collections Macdonald, S., A Guide to Museum Studies, Blackwell 2006 and Snaebjornsdottir, B. and Wilson, M. Nanoq: Flat Out and Bluesome, Black Dog 2006. Her book Museums, Media and Cultural Theory was published by Open University Press in 2006.
