Summer's Spirit

Thomas Jack Brown

Thomas Jack Brown is a video artist and video installation artist currently living in the West Midlands, United Kingdom. His current practice is exploring the nature of the reconstructive memory through hand crafting old Super8 negative to form new versions of the images captured.

Thomas recently graduated from the University of Worcester with a Master’s Degree in Creative Media, specialising in video art and video installation art. His Masters submission, a multi-Super8 projection installation titled ‘23/05/19’ was installed at The Hive library, Worcester in July 2019.

Since graduating, Thomas has received several regional commissions and residencies, producing video art work for The Arches Worcester, Severn Arts and The Asylum Art Gallery in Wolverhampton and interviewed by regional press and radio about his work and processes.

A digital video art piece that contains hand manipulated Super8 negative of a 1963 summer holiday from the United States of America. The negative has been cut into strips, undergone application of paint and dried, reconstructed with Super8 film tape, projected using a Fujicascope Super8 projector against an off-white canvas, digitised multiple times using a Canon 650D, and the digital capture has been edited using the Adobe Creative Suite and layered over multiple captures of clouds. Audio consists of archive recordings, captured audio from local parklands and captured audio of Super8 cameras in motion.

Summer’s Spirit shows my view that memories of holidays from different moments of our past can coalesce into one experiential moment. Experiences from multiple visits to the same coastal town, campsite or city at different points in one’s life can non-linearly blur together. Similar and arguably insignificant experiences from different holidays, such as building sandcastles, eating ice cream or playing miniature golf can cross over between memories of different holidays and become out of place and time. Important events that occur while on holiday such as a kiss, or becoming friends with people due to being in the accommodation next door can mix with flashes of insignificant moments to form a reshaped version of the moment within the whole coalescing mix of these memories.

Summer’s Spirit aims to show this coalescence of memory and aims to spark the viewer’s own fond memories of their past summer experiences as, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a summer holiday season for UK citizens looks less and less likely. Our memories of past summers may be able to keep our hopes for future good times alive, in whatever shape and form they may take.