Having met Yuri Pattison through our appearance at Off Modern, we asked the artist and designer a few questions about his photographic work. Work that we first stumbled across through his website.

How did you start using photography as an artistic medium?

I’ve been using photography in my work on and off for the last couple of years, probably since I started seriously making work so I suppose it’s always been part of what I do but it became an integral part of my practice around the time I started using scientific Polaroid screen shot cameras for my “Channel 21″ series.

What do you do the rest of the time?

I work within an artistic collaborative called Lucky PDF and I am part of Off Modern, running art and music events, exhibitions and doing design.

I also spend time on my own practice working in more sculptural and digital media areas, at the moment I’m currently working on a PERMACULTURES residency at SPACE Studios which references the Michael Faraday Memorial (photos of which will be on ICAFM soon).

How did the body of work on ICAFM come about?

After the “Channel 21″ piece I began to realise that I was as interested in the processes involved in taking the photo as I was with the final product, it also led me to value what I previously thought of as research photography as having the potential of being finished pieces.

At the same time I began to take a growing number of pictures of buildings around London, particularly Brutalist architecture and forgotten ’60s and ’70s office blocks. I didn’t really have a reason for this other than an appreciation of the architecture and an urge to capture this as I negotiated the city.

ICAFM grew out of this, an attempt to personally contextualise and catalogue my daily research output for myself and develop it further for use within my other work – however it also inhabits the space of an ongoing public work and an attempt at an effective display strategy. Since then I have began using stand alone websites as display methods for projects, the latest being explorethemuseum.org, so I suppose ICAFM also represents a turning point in my attitude to how I display work.

Can you explain the name?

“I call architecture frozen music” is a Goethe quote which resonated with me when I was looking for a simple, yet somewhat descriptive, name for the website. And the domain happened to be available.

Yuri Pattison

Website
ExploreTheMuseum.org
ICallArchitectureFrozenMusic.com