Paul Burns
I believe that to be attentive to the simple act of ‘seeing’ and to attune such awareness through the camera offers an unlimited scope of imagery to communicate the aesthetic sensitivities and the subtleties of experience that occur within everyday reality.
Paul Burns: Untitled (no 2), Interior Viewpoints Series, May 2009, image courtesy the artist.
Paul Burns is an artist currently living and working in Belfast. He graduated from Central St Martins College of Art and Design in London. He resumed activity as an artist in 2007 after working for about ten years in other fields.
Burns’s work focuses primarily a task in “tracking the phenomenon of vision.” Using commonplace settings such as room interiors and urban landscapes, the he manages to capture various forms of light using candidly shot photographs.
Burns’s attentiveness to the simple act of ‘seeing’ to communicate the aesthetic sensitivities and the subtleties of experience in everyday life. The artist attunes such awareness through the camera lens.
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Current Work
Paul Burns, Untitled, Interior Viewpoint Series, May 2009, photograph, image courtesy the artist.
Burns’s current photographic work is part of an ongoing series that he began in 2008. The photographs are taken from various viewpoints within his home. He feels that this familiarity to a particular place allows for imagery to develop over time. His interior viewpoints series serve to address different aspects of photography. The work considers the effect of light on objects and spaces and also the history of the photograph itself- as a tool to record the past.
It is because many of the viewpoints I depict are recurring, as a result of revisiting, that I find myself working with continuous series which stress the essentially objective experience of the present time and the seemingly eternal qualities of light.
Firstly, his focus is on light – how it distorts, filters and reflects objects and spaces. Burns chooses places in his home which suggest an absence of subject. It is intended that the images will prompt the viewer to question what is beyond a given viewpoint. Burns work also hopes to shift accepted notions of the photograph as an historical document – as something that has happened – and instead, to situate and relate the image to present time.