f a i l s a f e f a i l e d

An exhibition at The Art House Wakefield from 5th April - 15th April 2021

Work that explored my relationship with a broken accordion past down to me from my great grandfather, a man killed at 27 by horse and carriage. This exhibition used discarded televisions, storytelling and sound to explore my relationship with time through this broken musical instrument.

Listen to the audio version

As human beings we live our lives in time but during the global pandemic our relationship with time has been altered, weeks fly by while days drag on. Our sense of ourselves is tied up in what we want to achieve or become, but the future has been paused and a self-reflective malaise has taken hold. We have all become disconnected from the future, we are stuck in the present. With an increasingly unclear future this is now the ideal moment to explore and challenge our understanding of time.

We have always had a complicated relationship with time. The clock made capitalism possible, ‘because, without some means of exact time keeping industrial capitalism could never have developed and could not continue to exploit the workers, the clock represents an element of mechanical tyranny in the lives of modern [people] more potent than any individual exploiter or than any other machine.’

Time, before clocks, felt more fluid. As days get longer or shorter by tiny increments working days altered to coincide. Pre clocks our life was dictated by light, still an annually repetitive marker of the passage of time but far less systemised, is it possible to get back to that experience?

Humans seem to have a deep connection to timing in music. The rhythmic pace of walking, the movement of our limbs, the beating of our heart, our breathing all tends to follow a time-signatures. To disrupt them sits uncomfortably and challenges our preconception, exploring the regular, the rhythmic, the jarring and anxiety inducing. Imperfection has underpinned my work and I use the unmusical to comment on my failures. To play ‘badly’ is to play either out-of-tune or out-of-time, these two constraints seem to be the key differences between music and sound.

These videos are presented a series of twelve in the form of a concept album where each ‘track’ is a stand alone pieces but the collection of twelve also works as one piece or album.

‘A present without a future, is a life that feels less worth living, because it is a life haunted by the shadow of futility’.

Listen to the record version of: As yet untitled

Apophenia

The full book is available for free at: Apple Books

‘No one realised the book and the labyrinth were one and the same...a hapless mass of contradictory rough drafts’.

Extracts from ‘Apophenia’, book 2 of what will be a series of books investigating the power of art practice to explore scientific theories from an experiential perspective, where rhizomatic connections are made between processes and concepts to explore our misunderstanding of time through non-dogmatic experimentation.

This book was written in a non-linear manner and therefore the book may take tangents.

This book is intended to be navigated using the hyperlinks which are formatted traditionally, coloured blue and underlined. The book can be scrolled through in a linear manner but the order of the pages will be the order in which they were written and the connections between the sections will not be clear.

This book was written in three stages to mirror the process by which I make much of my artwork:

Rhizomatic: I allow the work to take the direction it wants. When writing if a new direction occurs I will pause and start a new section that explores that idea. Each section is not a comprehensive examination of that idea but all together creates a comprehensive examination of my practice.

Rewrite: I then rewrite each section, correct errors and only at this point remove the sections I feel are irrelevant. Each section much have a purpose, even though the book may take tangents, each section must serve the whole. The rhizomatic invokes the law of unintended consequences but at this point a more analytical view will be taken.

Apophinia: Finally I hunt for connections between the sections adding hyperlinks to connect them. These links can be thematical, chronological or instinctual.

I don’t believe my mind works in a solely linear manner.

‘the wish to capture evanescent reflections, is not only impossible, as has been shown by thorough German investigation, but the mere desire alone, the will to do so, is blasphemy. God created man in his own image, and no man-made machine may fix the image of God. Is it possible that God should have abandoned his eternal principles, and allowed a Frenchman in Paris to give to the world an invention of the Devil’

large scale darkroom prints

The full book is available for free at: http://books.apple.com/us/book/id1551556319

PDF version without embedded videos at:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17xPE6jv1aPaqWn1if2bmkSTzfApm_2ba/view?usp=sharing

Nothing is effortless is book 1 of what will be a series of books investigating the power of art practice to explore scientific theories from an experiential perspective, where rhizomatic connections are made between processes and concepts in a hope to question our understanding.

This book, part 1 started as an exploration of myself as an artist trying to discover my own relevance in this world and concludes with me building a way of working that allows me to explore the nature of reality and my understanding - or lack of it.

The videos serve as a series of experiments with book as an accompaniment along with two films exploring ‘the lecture’ as an art form within itself.

Throughout much of my work I have been fascinated by the nature of time and how different media such as film, photography and sound deal with their relationship with time. Time is not just a scientific concept but also an experiential part of all our lives. Through this work I have begun to think of time as not just a sequential chronological event but as a more malleable layered and complex phenomena. In producing my artwork every step of the process is afforded equal stature and relevance, the outcome is no more important than the process. This is in opposition to traditional ideas where the outcome is viewed as the most important aspect of an art piece …it’s end point. However with nonlinear time unfolding as a palimpsest the beginning, end and each step have equal status and should be viewed as such.

Over the last fifteen years I have spent a lot of time in Paris. Initially I visited to explore the birth place of street photography but more recently spending time documenting the bars and cafes as the inevitable Americanisation of the city fights against a place obsessed with tradition and holding on to its old fashioned identity. Using the dying processes of darkroom photography as a mirror to the slow decay of the traditional French culture I was hoping to capture the destruction of the past and inevitability of its death.

From my Paris photographs I have started producing a book of drawings. Based on mathematical grid structures, the drawings juxtapose the organic and sometimes chaotic nature of the city with its rules and order reflecting a place constructed on a mathematical spiral. 

a choice between stillness and motion: 4 years, 7 months, 19 days, 0 hours and 31 minutes of my life

Photographs of abandoned buildings

Since graduating from a multi media fine art course where I specialised in photography, book production and computer generated artwork I have continued to investigate these areas. 

My initial focus was on the production of photographic work using the darkroom experimentally, incorporating painting techniques alongside scientific processes and the theoretical concept of chaos to generate uniqueness in an otherwise reproductive process. 

As I explored this area I became increasingly interested in the processes rather than the content, the photographic images being less important than the process and theories by which they are produced. This influenced the production of a book documenting archaic photographic techniques.

Over the last fifteen years I have spent a lot of time in Paris. Initially I visited to explore the birth place of street photography, I have more recently spent time documenting the bars and cafes as the inevitable Americanisation of the city fights against a place obsessed with tradition and holding on to its old fashioned identity. Using the dying processes of darkroom photography as a mirror to the slow decay of the traditional French culture I was hoping to capture the destruction of the past and inevitability of its death.

From these photographs I started producing a book of drawings. Based on mathematical grid structures, the drawings juxtapose the organic and sometimes chaotic nature of a city with its rules and order reflecting a place constructed on a mathematical spiral. 

Printing is going through dramatic changes. Since the phrase ‘print is dead’ was coined in the early 80’s by tech developers in the US the move toward the digitalisation of the book has been inevitable and I would like to explore books in the digital age.

The book has been viewed as one of the most sacred records of the human experience, a vessel and symbol of knowledge and one of our most protected objects.

I love both physical and digital books, the sequential imagery, combination of text and image and I would like to investigate the potential that the book still holds; from their production, the democratisation of publishing and distribution, to the potential that new technologies allow for both digital and tradition books within the art and design area.

I would like to use books as a way to draw together the sometimes disparate elements of my practice and unify ideas and techniques through this medium.

My practice is informed by a range of theoretical and sometimes disparate ideas. My love of mathematics, scientific investigation and empiricism inform much of my work. From early alchemical ideas and symbols to contemporary mathematics and quantum mechanics, I am interested in how these can be expressed or viewed through artist processes. This is most evident in my darkroom practice, drawings and work with sequential imagery as I explore ideas of impermanence and death as I trying to visualise the invisible. 

Photographically my practice draws from the work of Sally Mann, Roger Ballen, Eugene Richards, the exhibition ‘Shadow Catchers’ and the current ‘Shape of Light’ exhibition at the Tate Modern. I have always tried to reject the traditional obsession of photographers to make ‘the perfect image’ and tried instead to embraced and reflect human imperfection in my work. The work of Miroslav Tichy and Jeff Cowen have helped to inform this practice.

In my opinion some of the best contemporary photography is being produced in cinema such as the films of David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky, Jonathan Glazer and the early films of David Fincher as well as the music videos of people such as Chris Cunningham. 

The 2013 exhibition at the V&A, ‘Blood on the Page’ exhibited a range of artists books and journals from the large scale lead books of Anslem Kiefer to the detritus collection of Francis Bacon. This along with the Ray Gun magazine aesthetic and the non sequential House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski has informed my practice in relation to book production.

More recently my practice has drawn on the work of Rembrandt, a wide variety of religious painting, Dutch Still Lifes, collections and reference books and the concept of the ‘hyperlink’.

My work has sometimes revolved around events and over the past few years I have worked in conjunction with a musician producing pop up shows. These have combined music and art making one off events that try to challenge the conventions of both a gig and an exhibition.

Various