Contextual Research

With my head down in my machines, I have found that a lot of the exploration I have gone through can be found in parts in various other existing works. In galleries it can be very difficult to identify these - and other times very easy.

It was easy, for example, when looking at Damien Hirst’s work “Forms without Life” in the Tate Britain, to see ideas that I have been circling. 

Hirst writes: “There’s that kind of morbid element to it [death], which is lost because we’re so accustomed to seeing shells.” And this relationship between the object on display having once had purpose and form is very much an idea that formed the foundations of my project, along with the presentation of these shells - simply laying them out on display. 

The life that they were once part of, they can never fulfil that role again, they can never be used for that purpose again, just like the screws I’ve removed from machines.

I was also concerned with looking at multiples - art involving lots of individual components en masse; Carl Andre’s ‘Equivalents’ are all also technically ‘found objects’, arranged neatly, so that “they come above your ankles, as if you were wading in bricks.”

I find that arrangements of the bricks has a wonderfully satisfying symmetry. The sort that I would certainly want to mess up - then again, it’s exactly the same sense of satisfaction I find from laying out the neat presentation of my own work.

A piece more closely aligned with some of the theory behind my work is ‘Cold Dark Matter : An Exploded View’. Cornelia Parker was looking in to ‘cartoon deaths’. “To analyse something that was totally beyond our control and emotional control”, she has said. In her artistic process, she exploded a garden shed (“The garden shed came about because I was trying to find something universal and archetypal.”) and with the broken remains, suspended them in the air and placed a light in the centre - and as a result, it looks as if the explosion is suspended in time. 

This is similar to what I am trying to do - taking something apart, destroying something we recognise, and displaying remnants of it to provoke a reaction.