Spike Open 2015

From The Cast Room

Mixed media

Dimensions variable

May, 2015

In 2012, I embarked upon a project that has been influenced by or makes reference to a variety of texts.  The project broadly looked at the workings of the inner and outer worlds of experience, landscape and the need for convalescence during and after a non visible illness.  The texts include Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, The Waste Land by T S Eliot, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in England, 1969, Smithson's A Tour of The Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Patrick Keiller's The View From The Train.

The project has six parts, of which the one shown here at Spike Island Open 2015, is Part 5, a version of The Cast Room (Things To Do While Convalescing). Parts 1 and 6 are video works or brief films: Voyager, shot in Paris and Margate, Rollright/Silbury recorded at the stone circle in Oxfordshire and the earth mound in Wiltshire. The other parts are: Part 2, a text, Logbook, Part 3 Alpines and Part 4, a set of paintings made on card and art related publicity material.

Energy Drawing

Energy Drawing (Track 1)

pencil on paper

29x21 cm

2015

Slow down

Social participatory activity

Destroy all cars

Real world

Souvenir

Now

Warm city vents

S bahn to the Tiergarten

Steps to the sea, Penzance

Blaumeise blue tit

Things to do when convalescing

The burning of energy through oxygen,

a great fire that becomes consumptive

Priestley, Lavoisier, Sebald.

Rootballhead

Rootballhead  

digital photograph

2015

Oscillator

Oscillator  (2015) digital video, 1min 37 seconds, colour, mute

The Cast Room

The Cast Room: Display Table

mixed materials with plaster, wooden stand

dimensions variable

2014

The Cast Room: Thermur

plaster, wood, mdf

40x35x12cm

2014

Gulf of Corryvreckan

It is not much over half a mile wide, yet it is more than 300 feet deep over most of its width, except in one significant spot, where a huge conical rock is sunk only ninety feet beneath the surface.  It is called Cailleach, 'The Hag'.

Deakin, Roger. (2000). Waterlog. A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain.   London.  Vintage.  P249.

Cerf

Cerf

oil & paper on FT

257x175 mm

2014

Before American Night

duct tape & xerographic reproductions

dimensions variable

2014

Still Can Be

oil on exhibition pamphlet section

208x147 mm

2014

Rollright

oil on exhibition preview card

210x148 mm

2014

Roman Ondák: Measuring the Universe

Roman Ondák.  Measuring the Universe (2007), MoMA

As usual there was a long wait in the Ufficio Matricola, where prisoners go through all the ceremonies of admission and discharge.  A man ahead of us, brought in by the American Counter-Intelligence Corps, was being fingerprinted, and one realised, even in such a small detail as this, how barbarous the system is, and how clear was the intention that the prisoner must be made to realise that everything civilised had been left behind.  One of the office staff simply grabbed the man's hand, pressed the splayed-out fingers on to the inked pad, then on a form, then gestured to him to go and wipe his fingers on the wall.  

Lewis, Norman.  1983.  Naples '44.  London.  Eland.  Page 81.

First published 1978, William Collins.

Here For Your Life

Here For Your Life

Preview invitation card, oil paint

193x148mm

The Situationists

Photographs: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean Bourgeois, Bruno Barbey

And yet, how rare were the references to the great names of ideology – Marx, Lenin, Mao, even Che Guevara – on the walls of Paris.  They would later appear on badges and T-shirts, as icons symbolizing the overthrow of systems.  The student rebels reminded theorists of a long-forgotten Bakuninist anarchism, but if anything they were closest to the ‘situationists’, who had anticipated a ‘revolution of everyday life’ through the transformation of personal relations.  That (and their Gallic brilliance at devising memorable slogans) is why they became the mouthpiece of an otherwise inchoate movement, although it is almost certain that hardly anyone until then had heard of them, outside a small circle of left-wing painters.  (I certainly had not.)

Hobsbawm, Eric.  (2002).  Interesting Times, A Twentieth Century Life.  London.  Penguin Press.  P.248.

James Salter

The room had become confining for him, a regular closet.  He stood up.  He felt like a man who puts weight on a bad leg for the first time.  Suddenly he was conscious of his position, uncomfortably.  He was the leader.  There seemed to be something artificial and repugnant about that, as if he were wearing a bright shirt with the word printed on it. Everything had been so effortless until now.  Unexpectedly, the simplicity of things was gone.  It had been a bad day.

When the ships returned from a mission, everybody watched for them.  Usually, they came lining back to the field in flights of four, flying tight show formation with the black smoke fading in parallel streams behind as they turned in toward the runway and landing pattern. They seemed to be most indestructible then.  They were of frozen silver.  Nothing could possibly dim that grace.  No enemy could deny them. Departures were stirring: but, every return, even the most uneventful, was somehow transcendent and a call to the heart to rise in joy.  Out of the north they had come again, brief strokes of splendor.



Extracts from:  Salter, James. (2007) The Hunters.  London.  Penguin.  First published 1956.

F86 Sabre