Commissioned by Radiator, Nottingham 2002
This group of works, in whcih I make myself into a swarm, follows on from a number of others: Avid Metamorphosis I and II, Shrinking the Miniature and Hidden Seas /Surface Waters, that touch upon the possibility of re-negotiating the limits of the body/self.
Commissioned by Firstsite. Exhibited: The Minories, Colchester 1996
Performance for camera, 1999 - Duration 11 minutes
Drawing on family experience of physical disability Hidden Seas /
Surface Waters attempted to articulate a body of difference, whose
boundaries remain physiologically and psychologically fluid,
inverting the characteristic function of light as a source of
'illumination'.
The use of silhouettes within the work references the 18th century
physiognomic experiments of James Lavater, who attempted to read
from the profile of his sitters their moral and spiritual 'nature'.
Supported by a London Arts Board - London Hybrids Research and
Development Award.
Production support Irish Museum of Modern Art and Arthouse,
Dublin.
Residency and screening: Irish Musueum of Modern Art, Dublin. 1999
Exhibited, Spacex, Exeter. 2003
Commissioned: Span 2. Exhibited: Dilston Grove London, 2002, Taxi Gallery, Cambridge 2002.
Sound Recording
A selection from a larger body of images, culled from the internet using the word underwater as a search term, first presented as a slide show at Earth and Ocean Day at the National Oceanography Centre, March 09.
Ranging from 19th century illustrations of Jules Verne's 20,000.00 Leagues Under the Sea, to designs for the proposed Poseidon Mystery Island underwater resort, they chart the emergence of the undersea within visual culture, revealing an increasing drive towards its domestication and a loss of the awe and foreboding that initially characterised such images.
Also notable is the extent to which women seem to both figure within and comfortably inhabit the undersea world.
A series of works in progress exhibited at Howard Gardens
Gallery, University of Wales Institute and The National
Oceanography Centre, Library, Southampton
Each marks an attempt to engage with processes of representing the
undersea world while providing a ounterpoint to the virtual and
optical emphasis of scientific methods. Seeking ways of 'knowing',
centred upon the imagination, desire, the body and touch, capable
of resisting the separation of subject and object demanded by the
use of observation as a way of encountering the world.
A New Set of Borders for the
Kingdom uses geological and political data (deploying the
same modelling programmes as the oceanographers I am working with)
to reveal the underwater borders of the UK, while refering also to
the current territorial undersea expansion of many nation states.
For my scientific colleagues this kind of 3D dimensional map, which
differs significantly from the 2d and screen based representations
with which they are familiar, has prompted a new awareness of the
different ways in which the movement of water and air determine
topography.
By contrast to dive, to fall,
to float, to fly while reminiscent of corporeal and
geological forms has no actual geographic referent. Shaped by the
tug of gravity, it conjures a space that pulls similarly at our
imagination, both drawing and threatening.
Composed of 10,923.00 metres of string, enough to reach the bottom
of the deepest surveyed point on Earth, Challenger Deep, A sailor went to sea, sea, sea, to see
what he could see, see, see and all that he could see, see, see,
was the bottom of the deep blue sea, sea, sea functions as
another kind of index, offering a measure of both the distance
involved and a trace of the near 2100,00 circuits of the space I
walked while laying it out.
Similarly each of the 10-plaster reliefs that make up Ten Atlantic Days, the outlines of which
were generated by a pen, hung by a thread from the table of my
cabin aboard the RRS James Cook, offer a record of the motion of
the sea over an 8-hour period on ten different days. Inspired in
part by
William Moon's embossed maps for the blind, they operate as
kind of fingerprint making the otherwise invisible, tangible.
A freeze frame of a different sort is provided by the process of
firing two handfuls of silt, collected from 4,000.00 metres below
sea level in Whittard Canyon, a deep submarine canyon off the coast
of Ireland, making the insubstantial solid. I want, I want, I want
suggests the possibility of reaching down into the depths and
grasping what lies below, giving a lie to the difficulty which
accompanies the actual processes of retrieving such material. Its
earthy materiality striking a sharp contrast with 11"21' North, 142" 12' East - Mariana
Trench Abstraction a computer generated model, in which
scientific data is manipulated so as to allow an impossible
viewpoint in, around and through, the deepest place on earth.
Finally A long slow walk of
20,000 leagues fancifully charts a walk along the route of
Jules Verne's Nautilus submarine, from the Pacific, through the
Mediterranean, under Antarctica, to its demise in a whirlpool off
the coast of Norway. A journey, the playful idiosyncrasy of which,
offers a wry perspective on attempts to 'know' the deep sea.
