2004 – ongoing

A permanent networked installation commissioned for C & J Clarks Headquarters, Street, Somerset

A webcam was placed on the Clarks complex in Street Somerset – looking out over Glastonbury Tor three miles away.

The webcam was programmed to record images pixel by pixel, with a whole image representing approximately a day. Each image was collected from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal bands continuously and transmitted in real time to be displayed on an LCD flat screen display in the gatehouse reception area of the Clarks complex.

The result is a series of gradually unfolding landscape images harvested and archived over the course of the year.
The work encodes the view of the Tor over time, with different tonal horizontal bands recording fluctuations in light and movement throughout the day and with broad bands of black depicting nighttime.

A set of three prints large format archival digital inkjet print derived from the Pixelscape for Glastonbury Tor archive were produced with the Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol in 2007 and exhibited in Committed to Print at the Royal West of England Academy 2007, and Northern Print 2008.

The chemical photographic negative holds a latent image which is revealed in the development of its silver salts. The digital image file is another kind of latent image, but one that can only be developed or interpreted by the digital software in cameras, computers, and the color profiles for inks, papers and the printer itself. Susan Collins’s work demonstrates the extraordinary range in this interpretation, with its conversion of digital video data into a graphic mural of time passing, from the modern urban to the mythological landscape. At close range, the ink-jet printed surface presents us with lush chromatic hues in clusters of enlarged pixels, which seem almost musical in their measured notation.
– Dr Anne Hammond, Centre for Fine Print Research