Bill Jackson is a multi award winning film maker, photographer and sound artist. His recent film FOG has been awarded 9 Best Experimental Film awards from Toronto via New York, London and Florence. He is the only photographer to win awards in three consecutive years at the prestigious Royal Photographic Print Awards. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. He recently and continues to do so been working with Chrysalis Records and the Nick Drake archive in producing 23 films for the album, The Songs of  Nick Drake: The Endless Coloured Ways, combining his stills and moving images into one cinematic canvas. He now lives and works in Suffolk which continues to influence and inspire his work.

 

A conceptualist arts education in the early 70's at Coventry School Of Art, continues to inform his thinking and work practice. Heavily influenced by his photographic tutor at Coventry, Gordon Goode, who introduced him to performance photography. (Goode had been the photographer for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford in its formative years of the 1950’s and ‘60s.) As a child he was fascinated by the world of darkness from the streets of Coventry to the cinema and the stage, and this has ultimately affected his practice. 

 

“As a film maker and photographer I seek to suspend time and create place by layering still and moving image resulting in an existential experience of the landscape. You are removed from reality and are invited in to contribute to the narrative that evolves before you. I interrogate concepts of time which is crucial to my ideas, exchanging the classic definition of photography as a series of instant glimpses of the world in which we live, to a personal definition of ‘space-time’.

 

My work as the investigative artist primarily revolves around creating spaces to allow people to take time out from their busy world and to invite them into my secret world. I prefer to see my work not as images or objects but as appearances that reveal themselves over time. I work in the landscape at night from dusk till dawn, especially the time when the light slowly fades only to creep back in at dawn. The weakening hour.

 

This phenomena of penumbral revelations need time to be discovered. I utilise still, moving and sound responses to take you into a journey of discovery sometimes that discovery becomes a very personal journey. I seek to remind people that magic still exists, the magic of wonderment that we all experienced as a child but have seemingly lost.

 

I create the conditions for events to take place. I don't direct those events , I just document them. “

 

Bill Jackson 2023