My subject is war, Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead, UK. Exhibited 1993 – 1994.
Various materials, including machine knitted textiles, oil paint on board, wood, found objects, barbed wire, plaster. Dimensions of triptychs 244 h x 370 approximately, other dimensions unknown.
These works were based on the idea of history repeating itself, and were first shown together in an exhibition celebrating the war poetry of Wilfred Owen. The triptychs were responses to the conflicts in the Balkans following the breakup of Yugoslavia, and drew on various imagery from the First and Second World Wars. These were the last paintings I exhibited before focussing on installations and sculptures.
Dislocate, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, UK. Exhibited 1995
Various materials, including tiles, chipboard panels, inspection light, white leatherette, rubber, glass, fabric. Dimensions variable.
This installation brought together fragments of works – tiled walls, glazed box, bed-like structure – from previous works. The underlying ideas were equally fragmentary, moving from memories of abandoned hospitals to the illuminated enclosures of churches. The title Dislocate reflects the uncertainty of the installation.
Lost found, The Glass Box Gallery, Salford, UK. First exhibited 1996
Various materials, including found gloves, lights, glass, mirrors, metal fixings. Dimensions variable.
As winter approaches the gloves can be found - dropped at a bus stop, left on a bench, lost in the leaves on the city street. Each glove retains the connection to its once-owner, a fragment from which a speculative biography can be constructed.
The gloves were collected over two winters, and then exhibited in a way that indicated some sort of examination, an attempt to archive the lost objects into a system. Beneath each glove on the trolley was a mirror, the reflection of the absent half of the pair.
A collaboration with Janet Farahar.
The Archive of Lost Knowledge. Exhibited in The Gallery, Wollaton Hall Natural History Museum, Nottingham, UK, in 2001.
Timber, chipboard, MDF, paint, varnish, lights, light fittings and conduit, natural history specimens. Dimensions 300 h x 600 x 1800
A ruined museum, one emptied of its holdings and now no more than an architecture that lays out a route through lost knowledge. There are gaps in the walls, allowing glimpses of what has been lost, the memory of understanding gained through encounters with objects. The structure begins to degrade, revealing the underlying supports. This building is a surface of certainty, an attempt to inculcate one view. But now it is failing.
Institute. Exhibited in Plan 9, The Old Police Station, Bristol, UK, in 2009
Wood, aluminium, lenses, mirrors, steel fixings, 4 x 2 screen personal DVD players, 4 single channel videos. Dimensions variable
This work began with a series of videos taken during wanders in Tokyo, and with the realisation that the videos, and my understanding of what I was filming, was always framed by my specific cultural background. The videos, fragments of things seen and heard in a strange city, are seen via lenses and mirrors, and this means that the viewer has to discover the optimum viewing position. Small DVD players with two screens were used for both video and sound, and thus the soundtracks of each individual video would slip out of phase, a changing soundscape that mirrored that encountered during a city wander.
Placed in a room in a disused police station, the viewing machines allowed glimpses into another place, another time.
Singer. Exhibited in Bopilau Historical Quarter, Taipei, Taiwan, as part of the exhibition Hieroglyphic Memory. Exhibited in 2016
Plywood, lights, magnifying lenses, sewing machines. Dimensions 200 h x 244 x 60
The machines, now obsolete, are the traces of the history of the place. Each machine bears the imprint of those who used it, the marks of now vanished industries.
Wanhua, an area of Taipei, Taiwan, was once known for workshops producing garments. Most of these have now vanished, with one remaining trace being a place that services and fixes sewing machines. The owner also collects old sewing machines, and the machines in this work came from his collection.
The machines are viewed through lenses, providing a fragmentary glimpse into the past, allowing interpretation of what is seen. This is a cabinet of wonders, but wonders that were once mundane working machines.
Chamber of Uncanny Objects. Installed in the Museum of Archives, National Taiwan University, from 2015.
Timber, painted plywood, old museum cabinets, discarded objects from University, lights.
This installation was produced as part of a public art commission by the University. Students from the University were involved in the choice of objects and interpretative labels for the cabinets. The objects were from the storerooms of the various University departments.
Ghost library. Exhibited at Taipei Fine Art Museum (2018).
Painted plywood, lights, timers, fire escape sign, clock. 1600 x 200 x 500 (overall height including base wall)
The central concept underlying this installation was the necessity of libraries as repositories of knowledge and culture. A series of empty library shelves visible at the top of the end wall of the gallery. The only light comes from the windows of the doors at either end and in the centre, lights that flicker on and off as invisible presences go about their tasks. The clock no longer functions, time is stilled. This is the last fading sign of a disappearing institution of knowledge.
The work relates to multiple cross-disciplinary concepts, from the spatial, architectural, and social investigations of contemporary art practice and theory, to philosophical questions centring on epistemology, via the fictional worlds of literature and film.
Embassy. Exhibited at Keelung Cultural Center and Haping Geological Park, Keelung, Taiwan. (2018)
This work began with the idea of the Embassy – the official institutional face of Country or Empire, the projection of political power.
The idea of country or nation is fraught with complications and contradictions, as is readily clear in Taiwan, an independent, peaceful, democratic nation that, according to some, does not exist at all. In a world where the threats are global, the projection of state-power to deny freedom is ridiculous.
The Embassies in this work are ridiculous, little buildings with big flags, emitting blathering sounds through tin speakers. Two Embassies engage in a non-dialogue in the institutional space of the Hall of the Cultural Centre, while outside a lion ignores their prattle. Meanwhile, on a coast scattered with shale, sandstone, and fossils, another Embassy – this time in the guise of a military bunker – flies its flag in the face of the winds from the sea. This Bunker/Embassy is surrounded by the geological traces of deep time, a demonstration that Empires come and go, mere blips in the flow of time.
Embassy of Doggerland. Exhibited at C LAB, Taipei, Taiwan (2021)
Painted plywood, worklights. Models; painted MDF, cardboard. Dimensions variable.
Maps are records of past phenomena, the abstract traces of what was recorded and may now no longer exist. Maps are memory, as Google shows you your father’s garden before he removed the shed, or the vanished memorials of a community the state has deemed unpatriotic.
The geological map shows the strata that are the trace of vanished continents and seas, Maps of seismic data uncover the beds of long-gone rivers, the gouges of glaciers. The topographical map reveals the moraines left by retreating ice-sheets, the shallow pits dug by the people whose history is lost in the mists of mythology.
The North Sea lies between the Islands of Great Britain and the continents of Europe. In the approximate centre of the sea is the Dogger Bank, an undersea ridge that rises 45 metres above the seabed. Fishermen trawling the waters in the vicinity of the Bank would often find the bones of wolves, bears, and mammoths, the traces of human activity symbolised by harpoons made from antlers, flints that had been worked to produce tools, in their nets. It was assumed there might have been an arm of land connecting Europe and the Great Britain that allowed animals and humans to cross the North Sea.
It is now known that the Dogger Bank was the centre of an expanse of land that ran from Norway down to France, an area of fertile land with lakes and rivers that connected all of Europe. This vanished place – Doggerland – was the centre of Europe, a place of settlement and early civilisation.
Doggerland was covered by rising seas as the climate warmed and land shifted. The maps and surveys show the traces, we can discover the fragments, but we cannot be certain of what was once there. Doggerland is unrecoverable.
These ruined factories and old bunkers are beyond their historical moment, fragments of the past yet retaining an ambience of being ruins of an unknown future.
Various materials, including machine knitted textiles, oil paint on board, wood, found objects, barbed wire, plaster. Dimensions of triptychs 244 h x 370 approximately, other dimensions unknown.
These works were based on the idea of history repeating itself, and were first shown together in an exhibition celebrating the war poetry of Wilfred Owen. The triptychs were responses to the conflicts in the Balkans following the breakup of Yugoslavia, and drew on various imagery from the First and Second World Wars. These were the last paintings I exhibited before focussing on installations and sculptures.
Dislocate, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, UK. Exhibited 1995
Various materials, including tiles, chipboard panels, inspection light, white leatherette, rubber, glass, fabric. Dimensions variable.
This installation brought together fragments of works – tiled walls, glazed box, bed-like structure – from previous works. The underlying ideas were equally fragmentary, moving from memories of abandoned hospitals to the illuminated enclosures of churches. The title Dislocate reflects the uncertainty of the installation.
Lost found, The Glass Box Gallery, Salford, UK. First exhibited 1996
Various materials, including found gloves, lights, glass, mirrors, metal fixings. Dimensions variable.
As winter approaches the gloves can be found - dropped at a bus stop, left on a bench, lost in the leaves on the city street. Each glove retains the connection to its once-owner, a fragment from which a speculative biography can be constructed.
The gloves were collected over two winters, and then exhibited in a way that indicated some sort of examination, an attempt to archive the lost objects into a system. Beneath each glove on the trolley was a mirror, the reflection of the absent half of the pair.
A collaboration with Janet Farahar.
The Archive of Lost Knowledge. Exhibited in The Gallery, Wollaton Hall Natural History Museum, Nottingham, UK, in 2001.
Timber, chipboard, MDF, paint, varnish, lights, light fittings and conduit, natural history specimens. Dimensions 300 h x 600 x 1800
A ruined museum, one emptied of its holdings and now no more than an architecture that lays out a route through lost knowledge. There are gaps in the walls, allowing glimpses of what has been lost, the memory of understanding gained through encounters with objects. The structure begins to degrade, revealing the underlying supports. This building is a surface of certainty, an attempt to inculcate one view. But now it is failing.
Institute. Exhibited in Plan 9, The Old Police Station, Bristol, UK, in 2009
Wood, aluminium, lenses, mirrors, steel fixings, 4 x 2 screen personal DVD players, 4 single channel videos. Dimensions variable
This work began with a series of videos taken during wanders in Tokyo, and with the realisation that the videos, and my understanding of what I was filming, was always framed by my specific cultural background. The videos, fragments of things seen and heard in a strange city, are seen via lenses and mirrors, and this means that the viewer has to discover the optimum viewing position. Small DVD players with two screens were used for both video and sound, and thus the soundtracks of each individual video would slip out of phase, a changing soundscape that mirrored that encountered during a city wander.
Placed in a room in a disused police station, the viewing machines allowed glimpses into another place, another time.
Singer. Exhibited in Bopilau Historical Quarter, Taipei, Taiwan, as part of the exhibition Hieroglyphic Memory. Exhibited in 2016
Plywood, lights, magnifying lenses, sewing machines. Dimensions 200 h x 244 x 60
The machines, now obsolete, are the traces of the history of the place. Each machine bears the imprint of those who used it, the marks of now vanished industries.
Wanhua, an area of Taipei, Taiwan, was once known for workshops producing garments. Most of these have now vanished, with one remaining trace being a place that services and fixes sewing machines. The owner also collects old sewing machines, and the machines in this work came from his collection.
The machines are viewed through lenses, providing a fragmentary glimpse into the past, allowing interpretation of what is seen. This is a cabinet of wonders, but wonders that were once mundane working machines.
Chamber of Uncanny Objects. Installed in the Museum of Archives, National Taiwan University, from 2015.
Timber, painted plywood, old museum cabinets, discarded objects from University, lights.
This installation was produced as part of a public art commission by the University. Students from the University were involved in the choice of objects and interpretative labels for the cabinets. The objects were from the storerooms of the various University departments.
Ghost library. Exhibited at Taipei Fine Art Museum (2018).
Painted plywood, lights, timers, fire escape sign, clock. 1600 x 200 x 500 (overall height including base wall)
The central concept underlying this installation was the necessity of libraries as repositories of knowledge and culture. A series of empty library shelves visible at the top of the end wall of the gallery. The only light comes from the windows of the doors at either end and in the centre, lights that flicker on and off as invisible presences go about their tasks. The clock no longer functions, time is stilled. This is the last fading sign of a disappearing institution of knowledge.
The work relates to multiple cross-disciplinary concepts, from the spatial, architectural, and social investigations of contemporary art practice and theory, to philosophical questions centring on epistemology, via the fictional worlds of literature and film.
Embassy. Exhibited at Keelung Cultural Center and Haping Geological Park, Keelung, Taiwan. (2018)
This work began with the idea of the Embassy – the official institutional face of Country or Empire, the projection of political power.
The idea of country or nation is fraught with complications and contradictions, as is readily clear in Taiwan, an independent, peaceful, democratic nation that, according to some, does not exist at all. In a world where the threats are global, the projection of state-power to deny freedom is ridiculous.
The Embassies in this work are ridiculous, little buildings with big flags, emitting blathering sounds through tin speakers. Two Embassies engage in a non-dialogue in the institutional space of the Hall of the Cultural Centre, while outside a lion ignores their prattle. Meanwhile, on a coast scattered with shale, sandstone, and fossils, another Embassy – this time in the guise of a military bunker – flies its flag in the face of the winds from the sea. This Bunker/Embassy is surrounded by the geological traces of deep time, a demonstration that Empires come and go, mere blips in the flow of time.
Embassy of Doggerland. Exhibited at C LAB, Taipei, Taiwan (2021)
Painted plywood, worklights. Models; painted MDF, cardboard. Dimensions variable.
Maps are records of past phenomena, the abstract traces of what was recorded and may now no longer exist. Maps are memory, as Google shows you your father’s garden before he removed the shed, or the vanished memorials of a community the state has deemed unpatriotic.
The geological map shows the strata that are the trace of vanished continents and seas, Maps of seismic data uncover the beds of long-gone rivers, the gouges of glaciers. The topographical map reveals the moraines left by retreating ice-sheets, the shallow pits dug by the people whose history is lost in the mists of mythology.
The North Sea lies between the Islands of Great Britain and the continents of Europe. In the approximate centre of the sea is the Dogger Bank, an undersea ridge that rises 45 metres above the seabed. Fishermen trawling the waters in the vicinity of the Bank would often find the bones of wolves, bears, and mammoths, the traces of human activity symbolised by harpoons made from antlers, flints that had been worked to produce tools, in their nets. It was assumed there might have been an arm of land connecting Europe and the Great Britain that allowed animals and humans to cross the North Sea.
It is now known that the Dogger Bank was the centre of an expanse of land that ran from Norway down to France, an area of fertile land with lakes and rivers that connected all of Europe. This vanished place – Doggerland – was the centre of Europe, a place of settlement and early civilisation.
Doggerland was covered by rising seas as the climate warmed and land shifted. The maps and surveys show the traces, we can discover the fragments, but we cannot be certain of what was once there. Doggerland is unrecoverable.
These ruined factories and old bunkers are beyond their historical moment, fragments of the past yet retaining an ambience of being ruins of an unknown future.
Interregnum, Winchester School of Art, Winchester, UK. Exhibited 1994
Various materials, including metal shelves, broken lights, tiles, steel, inspection light. Dimensions variable.
This work began with stories of hidden archives that had been broken into and wrecked. These archives contained information that would be used to control the populace, the archives of secret police and surveillance agencies.
The installation was in two spaces, the first was a room of wrecked shelving, and this led to the second space, a corridor lined with white tiles and fitted with a metal floor. The corridor led nowhere – a trap.
The title indicates that this is just an interlude. Eventually the state will begin to collect and archive information on those who do not conform.
23 august 1994, Skillion Business Centre, Liverpool, UK. Exhibited 1995
Found office furniture, lights and cable, newspaper page. Dimensions variable.
Chance dictated the form of this installation – the last-minute change of venue that meant the original idea could not be produced, the chance discovery of an abandoned office with a selection of cheap drawers and desks. Only the lights were brought to the site, and the title comes from a page of obituaries found in one of the drawers of the furniture.
Ordinary facts arranged within time. Exhibited in The Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK, in 2000
Wood, red linen over MDF, varnished MDF, lights, constructed slide projectors. Dimensions 250 h x 400 x 400 approximately.
This work was produced during PhD research, and had two starting points; one was the way in which museums lay out objects in specific sequences to produce the desired interpretation, and the second was to construct an enclosing space that was different from the external structure of that space.
The cabinets set into the circular walls contain hand-made slide projectors – a projector lens, a metal tube with a slit for a slide, a bulb, a fan to cool the bulb. The projectors each had a slide with a different letter of the word ‘museum’, meaning that viewing the projectors in the correct sequence produced the desired word. The noise from the fans made the interior of the space into a different aural environment, a happy accident.
Mnemosyne. Exhibited in Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby, UK, in 2005.
Metal shelves, 16 domestic televisions, 8 DVD players, 8 sets of powered speakers, 8 single channel videos with sound, lights, timber, chipboard. Dimensions 244 h x 500 x 500 approximately.
During the research for The Archive of Lost Knowledge the natural history museum’s storeroom of specimens had been photographed, and this installation drew on video taken in further storerooms of natural history specimens. As ways of presenting knowledge changed specimens that were felt to be unsettling were consigned to the storeroom, there to exist in a half-life of dust and darkness. This work used short video sequences on multiple old televisions (themselves suitable for a museum of fading technology) to bring the natural history specimens back for a short time, flickering across the screens like the half-recalled images of dreams.
There were 8 video sequences, each one played on 2 separated televisions. Each video had a soundtrack of musical fragments, so that the overall soundscape changed as the music faded in and out of sequence.
Crystal egg. Exhibited at Nanhai Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan, 2015
Plywood over timber room with constructed slide projectors
The projectors in this installation were constructed from old slide projector lenses built into a new device of mirrors and a further magnifying lens. The image, viewable via the magnifying lens on a target screen that was part of the projector, was from a 35mm slide. The image and device were one, the viewer being aware of the mechanism that produced the image.
The images, taken in a graveyard in Md-Wales, were close-ups of 19th century grave ornaments. These comprised round glass covers over ceramic sculptures of flowers and memorial decorations. Over time some of the interiors had become miniature gardens, accidental terrariums.
The images were not clear, inviting speculation as to the nature of what was seen. The title comes from a short story by H.G. Wells.
Space Station (Station 3). First version exhibited at SeeArt, Taipei (2017), extended version in M Space,Formosa Sculpture Biennial, Kaohsiung (2017 – 2018).
Painted plywood, timber frames, emergency lights, three channel soundtrack. Dimensions of extended version 244 h x 600 x 800.
There are those who think we can leave Earth when we have finished with the despoilation, and that this will be an easy thing. In the enclosed interior of the space station we will be prey to memories while we find ourselves trapped in endless corridors, as the warning lights indicate that something is going wrong.
This installation, which had two incarnations, the second an extended version of the first, drew on memories of science-fiction television from the 1960’s UK. In these uncanny alien spaces were conjured up with plywood and lights, allowing imagination to fill in the details.
For both installations there was a soundtrack composed by Yannick Dauby, low rumblings that were overlaid by higher frequencies, meanwhile numbers were intoned by an automated voice.
In the work the primary intention is to produce a space that invites interaction, an architecture that will draw the audience within its embrace. There are numerous ideas, both visual and conceptual, that form the basis for this particular work, with the dialogue between the initial ideas and the changing construction of the work producing further elements within the overall structure, and initiating further ideas to follow. The work can be seen to mirror its own creation, taking on a life of its own. As if it was not an act of construction, but the result of the uncovering of a pre-existing site.
The starting point was science-fiction, not the bright shiny science fiction of the contemporary media, but the science-fiction of television programmes of 1960’s UK, where the black and white images allowed room for imagination. As a child the imagery of these programmes affected my view of the city of my birth, where all strange corridors and abandoned buildings became infused with the possibilities of something unexpected, and a small room could be the entrance to another world. My love of science-fiction writing was engendered at this time, especially of those works that take as their subject the psychological effects of the Anthropocene.
A further idea referenced in the installation is the idea (rather than the actuality) of the space-station, and speculation on how anyone could cope with an existence forever contained within an endless interior. Maybe memory would begin to take over, and the ghosts of the past would materialise in the corridors. Such contained interiors are spaces that become divorced from connection to anything except what is within, and there is here a connection to Earth bound contained interiors. A specific film is referenced here, but I will leave you to guess which one…
The installation, by the fact that it is a space of corridors, proposes an unstated series of narratives. Installations are in this way akin to theatrical events. However, in the case of the installation, the audience become the actors in narratives of their own imagining.
The Office of Arcana. Exhibited in MoCA Taipei, Taiwan, 2022.
Installation - Painted plywood, timber, lights, glass, sound, text. Models – painted MDF, cardboard. Installed in 2 rooms, each 600 x 800 x 250h.
The Office of Arcana is a memory, or a foretelling. It is part of a larger institution that extends indefinitely, but in this section there are only six corridors. At the end of each corridor is a locked door, and through the window of each door can be seen vistas of ruination.
A speculative connection between military technologies and occult philosophy was the starting point for this work. Bringing together these two areas of disparate knowledge began as a way to question those (including the artist) who can be seduced into believing they know the way things are. As the ideas developed the supposed connections were revealed as having some basis in historical events (or may be that with a collection of fragmented facts connections can always be made).
Memories of the haunted landscapes of the UK fed into the work, together with the recognition of similar places in Taiwan, the kind of places where ruined structures could be glimpses an unspecified future. The (once-derided) literature of science fiction now seems to catch the present state with greater clarity than optimistic statements about the triumph of capitalism and the end of history. The land is haunted by what might have been.
The corridors in the installation are based on memories of government institutional spaces, offices for interviews, of spaces glimpsed through half-open doors. Corridors that symbolise interrogation and bureaucratic inertia, corridors that lead nowhere. In addition to the experience of real abandoned spaces the work has been influenced by the imagery and ideas of British science-fiction television programmes, and science-fiction films, of the 1960’s and 1970’s (the artist’s formative years). In these fictions alternative realities were conjured with plywood and models, producing worlds that allowed imagination to complete the scenario.
There is the influence of the numerous abandoned industrial and military buildings to be found in Taiwan, spaces that exert a fascination as initiators of speculative narratives. The installation contains elements of autobiography, with memories of the UK interweaving with current experiences of Taiwan.
The model interiors draw on the visual language of museum dioramas, puppet theatres, film sets that confuse simple readings of space and perspective. These draw on the relationship with the miniature, and the imaginative leap into the scaled-down spaces that is analogous to the suspension of disbelieve that lies at the heart of a narrative installation and a theatrical set.
The viewer thus becomes a participant in the work, an active presence.
Various materials, including metal shelves, broken lights, tiles, steel, inspection light. Dimensions variable.
This work began with stories of hidden archives that had been broken into and wrecked. These archives contained information that would be used to control the populace, the archives of secret police and surveillance agencies.
The installation was in two spaces, the first was a room of wrecked shelving, and this led to the second space, a corridor lined with white tiles and fitted with a metal floor. The corridor led nowhere – a trap.
The title indicates that this is just an interlude. Eventually the state will begin to collect and archive information on those who do not conform.
23 august 1994, Skillion Business Centre, Liverpool, UK. Exhibited 1995
Found office furniture, lights and cable, newspaper page. Dimensions variable.
Chance dictated the form of this installation – the last-minute change of venue that meant the original idea could not be produced, the chance discovery of an abandoned office with a selection of cheap drawers and desks. Only the lights were brought to the site, and the title comes from a page of obituaries found in one of the drawers of the furniture.
Ordinary facts arranged within time. Exhibited in The Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK, in 2000
Wood, red linen over MDF, varnished MDF, lights, constructed slide projectors. Dimensions 250 h x 400 x 400 approximately.
This work was produced during PhD research, and had two starting points; one was the way in which museums lay out objects in specific sequences to produce the desired interpretation, and the second was to construct an enclosing space that was different from the external structure of that space.
The cabinets set into the circular walls contain hand-made slide projectors – a projector lens, a metal tube with a slit for a slide, a bulb, a fan to cool the bulb. The projectors each had a slide with a different letter of the word ‘museum’, meaning that viewing the projectors in the correct sequence produced the desired word. The noise from the fans made the interior of the space into a different aural environment, a happy accident.
Mnemosyne. Exhibited in Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby, UK, in 2005.
Metal shelves, 16 domestic televisions, 8 DVD players, 8 sets of powered speakers, 8 single channel videos with sound, lights, timber, chipboard. Dimensions 244 h x 500 x 500 approximately.
During the research for The Archive of Lost Knowledge the natural history museum’s storeroom of specimens had been photographed, and this installation drew on video taken in further storerooms of natural history specimens. As ways of presenting knowledge changed specimens that were felt to be unsettling were consigned to the storeroom, there to exist in a half-life of dust and darkness. This work used short video sequences on multiple old televisions (themselves suitable for a museum of fading technology) to bring the natural history specimens back for a short time, flickering across the screens like the half-recalled images of dreams.
There were 8 video sequences, each one played on 2 separated televisions. Each video had a soundtrack of musical fragments, so that the overall soundscape changed as the music faded in and out of sequence.
Crystal egg. Exhibited at Nanhai Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan, 2015
Plywood over timber room with constructed slide projectors
The projectors in this installation were constructed from old slide projector lenses built into a new device of mirrors and a further magnifying lens. The image, viewable via the magnifying lens on a target screen that was part of the projector, was from a 35mm slide. The image and device were one, the viewer being aware of the mechanism that produced the image.
The images, taken in a graveyard in Md-Wales, were close-ups of 19th century grave ornaments. These comprised round glass covers over ceramic sculptures of flowers and memorial decorations. Over time some of the interiors had become miniature gardens, accidental terrariums.
The images were not clear, inviting speculation as to the nature of what was seen. The title comes from a short story by H.G. Wells.
Space Station (Station 3). First version exhibited at SeeArt, Taipei (2017), extended version in M Space,Formosa Sculpture Biennial, Kaohsiung (2017 – 2018).
Painted plywood, timber frames, emergency lights, three channel soundtrack. Dimensions of extended version 244 h x 600 x 800.
There are those who think we can leave Earth when we have finished with the despoilation, and that this will be an easy thing. In the enclosed interior of the space station we will be prey to memories while we find ourselves trapped in endless corridors, as the warning lights indicate that something is going wrong.
This installation, which had two incarnations, the second an extended version of the first, drew on memories of science-fiction television from the 1960’s UK. In these uncanny alien spaces were conjured up with plywood and lights, allowing imagination to fill in the details.
For both installations there was a soundtrack composed by Yannick Dauby, low rumblings that were overlaid by higher frequencies, meanwhile numbers were intoned by an automated voice.
In the work the primary intention is to produce a space that invites interaction, an architecture that will draw the audience within its embrace. There are numerous ideas, both visual and conceptual, that form the basis for this particular work, with the dialogue between the initial ideas and the changing construction of the work producing further elements within the overall structure, and initiating further ideas to follow. The work can be seen to mirror its own creation, taking on a life of its own. As if it was not an act of construction, but the result of the uncovering of a pre-existing site.
The starting point was science-fiction, not the bright shiny science fiction of the contemporary media, but the science-fiction of television programmes of 1960’s UK, where the black and white images allowed room for imagination. As a child the imagery of these programmes affected my view of the city of my birth, where all strange corridors and abandoned buildings became infused with the possibilities of something unexpected, and a small room could be the entrance to another world. My love of science-fiction writing was engendered at this time, especially of those works that take as their subject the psychological effects of the Anthropocene.
A further idea referenced in the installation is the idea (rather than the actuality) of the space-station, and speculation on how anyone could cope with an existence forever contained within an endless interior. Maybe memory would begin to take over, and the ghosts of the past would materialise in the corridors. Such contained interiors are spaces that become divorced from connection to anything except what is within, and there is here a connection to Earth bound contained interiors. A specific film is referenced here, but I will leave you to guess which one…
The installation, by the fact that it is a space of corridors, proposes an unstated series of narratives. Installations are in this way akin to theatrical events. However, in the case of the installation, the audience become the actors in narratives of their own imagining.
The Office of Arcana. Exhibited in MoCA Taipei, Taiwan, 2022.
Installation - Painted plywood, timber, lights, glass, sound, text. Models – painted MDF, cardboard. Installed in 2 rooms, each 600 x 800 x 250h.
The Office of Arcana is a memory, or a foretelling. It is part of a larger institution that extends indefinitely, but in this section there are only six corridors. At the end of each corridor is a locked door, and through the window of each door can be seen vistas of ruination.
A speculative connection between military technologies and occult philosophy was the starting point for this work. Bringing together these two areas of disparate knowledge began as a way to question those (including the artist) who can be seduced into believing they know the way things are. As the ideas developed the supposed connections were revealed as having some basis in historical events (or may be that with a collection of fragmented facts connections can always be made).
Memories of the haunted landscapes of the UK fed into the work, together with the recognition of similar places in Taiwan, the kind of places where ruined structures could be glimpses an unspecified future. The (once-derided) literature of science fiction now seems to catch the present state with greater clarity than optimistic statements about the triumph of capitalism and the end of history. The land is haunted by what might have been.
The corridors in the installation are based on memories of government institutional spaces, offices for interviews, of spaces glimpsed through half-open doors. Corridors that symbolise interrogation and bureaucratic inertia, corridors that lead nowhere. In addition to the experience of real abandoned spaces the work has been influenced by the imagery and ideas of British science-fiction television programmes, and science-fiction films, of the 1960’s and 1970’s (the artist’s formative years). In these fictions alternative realities were conjured with plywood and models, producing worlds that allowed imagination to complete the scenario.
There is the influence of the numerous abandoned industrial and military buildings to be found in Taiwan, spaces that exert a fascination as initiators of speculative narratives. The installation contains elements of autobiography, with memories of the UK interweaving with current experiences of Taiwan.
The model interiors draw on the visual language of museum dioramas, puppet theatres, film sets that confuse simple readings of space and perspective. These draw on the relationship with the miniature, and the imaginative leap into the scaled-down spaces that is analogous to the suspension of disbelieve that lies at the heart of a narrative installation and a theatrical set.
The viewer thus becomes a participant in the work, an active presence.