A line between the physical world as a cause in itself (causa sui) and the mind (which responds as an impulsive continuous narrator) drives me towards a desire to discard a written text that becomes necessary to make an artwork comprehensible – a codex for a cipher, often found in a booklet or inscribed in vinyl on a wall, shaping how one 'should' think of an artwork.
Even though you find me writing here now I do not want to need writing when exhibiting an artwork (to explain it) but I do require reading and speaking and sentiment to make it. The artwork I want to make should carry forward its intent without requiring a text. Yet I have published novellas alongside the works, these trouble the works rather than elucidate them.
But as a preamble …and as you are not in the artwork itself just now (probably) these word full web-pages stand as a proxy and bring forward some methods, which involve interweaving artistic production with human encounters, literature, philosophy and neuroscience.
What pervades the art works is a struggle to observe consciousness both as a phenomenon (how the structure of the mind works) in relation to the dubious conventions we live by (our social constructs) which we take as natural even though they are the product of both the human psyche and its inheritance. These conventions, which construct the larger human social narrative are evoked and supported by our technological developments in a mutual exchange between host and parasite where these protagonists are at times interchangeable.
Ultimately all concepts must pass the interface of the mind with all its caveats, misconceptions and hallucinations; we need to believe/comprehend deeply an idea before anything can change and where exactly do we find the core of our beliefs? The form of the neurological networks themselves shape a content that determine what is possible for us to think or believe.
There is a sense of melancholy for some of us that seems to be imbued in the nature of photo technologies, a longing that can not be fulfilled, that even in breath-taking beauty captured in an image in an instant there is a repressed aching for what an image lacks in its absent presence which seems to amplify our own inability to persist (or exist) as matter. Does our impulse to capture images stand for this impossible longing to exist in a meaningful way–does the image make a false promise to transcend disappearance and the image then become a way for us to exist in the minds of others when our bodies have rotted? Beyond the photograph, which in comparison can seem innocent there is of course the control and organisation of us all through data harvesting, which reduces us to defensible consuming algorithms and through which we produce the evidence that creates our own conviction, all there on our hard drives and phones, device that have almost become a state requirement, through which we are constantly tracked and in many societies repressed. However I do not feel this a job of art to deal with our surveillance, it needs clear political activism in its own right.
The narratives in the works are founded on a disposition for the suffering and joy of being human evoked by biographical fragments with human themes of aging, love, psychosis, longing, cults and beliefs, gender and loss and larger historical narratives of colonialism and its legacy. The forms used (built structures, music, voices, films and stills, drawings and actions dissemble the relationships between sound, image and material and seek to construct more a notion of the way mind works than the archetype of cause and effect inspired by the history of theatre and cinema. The effect is more often unlinked to a static cause in these works. Accident and chance are more relevant to how things arise.
Works that come out of me pivot on a point between the inside and outside of the body, the work always sought embodiment for the spectral image through shaped screens, environments, sounds etc.
Noted in Thames and Hudson's book Sixty Innovators Shaping Our Futures the form and content of my work consistently shape each other often with distinct processes and specific technical installations that have not been seen before in the particularity of their configuration.
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