Invisible Cities was a collaboration with Oxford-based artist Helen Ganly. This projection work uses photographs of urban and rural landscapes from around the world, collected by Helen over a 15 year period, as the source material for a continuously evolving projected montage.

Helen and I share an interest in the ephemeral - in the fragility and instability inherent in the world around us. For many years, Helen’s work has been inspired by the 1972 novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Helen’s earlier work appropriating this title was a slow dissolve presentation of 68 slides collected over a fifteen year period. This new version, uses digital scans of these images with a customised version of the image engine I originally developed for Strata. Projected live from a computer, continuously regenerating slowly evolving layers of montage, each moment is unique and ephemeral, recorded only by the memory of the viewer.

Helen Ganly was born in Cookham, Berkshire in 1940 and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1958 and 1962. She taught for ten years at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and in the Education Department of Oxford Brookes University. In the year 2000 she was given a Year of the Artist award to be the first Artist-in-Residence at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Screenshots ©2004 Helen Ganly and Neil C Smith

Exhibition History

• Invisible Cities : Carturesti, Bucharest, Romania : May 2006
• 4 aus Oxford : Frauen Museum, Bonn, Germany : Apr - Jun 2004
• The Oxford Show : Modern Art Oxford, Oxford : Feb - Mar 2004