The (t)here

2014

Canvas, unbleached wool, alder, earth ochres from Europe, water was combined; collected from the Barents Sea and every country border on the way to the Atlantic Ocean, a cairn of rocks collected from the beginning and from another beginning of the journey.

Existing in the landscape as I am, was and will be is attempting to think of another way of being. My traces have been left behind, washed away and reconfigured.

 

I carried the Sea. I carried the Sea.

I carried the Sea in my pocket, in my hands and on my skin; in the pit of my stomach and on the walls of my veins.

The Sea I carried, it is with me.

 

I carried the Earth. The Earth I carried.

I carried the Earth under my chin, beneath my feet and in my eyes; the weight of it clouds my chest.

I carried the Earth as it directed me and I will never be the same.

 

This möbius journey connects approximately 5,000km through the actions of swimming, cycling and walking. Each hanging landscape holds opposing the forms of the journey I made in the summer of 2013 from Knivskjellodden, Norway (the most northerly point on mainland Europe) to Tarifa, Spain, (the most southerly point on main land Europe). Starting in the Arctic and pausing to face Africa. It took 52days to self propel my being along these paths from north to south. Paths that have been used over time, and will be used in the future and so like the cycle of water and rocks, have a continuum.

Water was collected from the Barents Sea in Norway  and poured into the Atlantic Ocean at Tarifa. A rock was collected every day, labelled and carried as a way of indexing the journey.

 

NB. Photographs of this work are currently undergoing an editorial process and will be included shortly.

 

Continuum of Ceaseless Change is an exhibition featuring the work of twelve London-based artists working in a variety of media, selected by painter Laura Smith. The exhibition is based around the idea that actions are left exposed when works of art are created.  Each of the works on show will testify to some past impulse or physical happening, or else will contain within itself an ongoing force.

Ninna Bohn Pedersen will show drawings, perhaps the most direct traces of gesture that an artist makes. Tensions between chance and order, intention and intuition, emerge in the differing approaches to abstract painting of Sheenagh B. Geoghegan and Nicholas John Jones, while Liz Elton’s works begin as gestural paintings before undergoing transformation into digital print. Sculptor Sarah Pettitt disguises things with unsettling emotional resonance. Other processes will range from the ‘organic’ growth of Niamh Riordan’s virtual animation to the physical collapse of a sculpture by Mollie King; and concerns will vary from the poetic, in the paintings of Laura Smith to the absurd, in a film collaboration by Sarah Pager and Poppy Whatmore. In works made separately, Whatmore evokes human sensation in sculpture created from everyday materials, while Pager shows an anthropomorphised ‘breathing box’: a machine without a ghost. Elsewhere, a site-specific piece by Robert Rivers will respond to the physical space of the gallery, while Sam Mould’s work will use earth materials gathered on journeys made across entire countries.

Uniting these disparate works is a common tactility, inviting the viewer to consider each as the physical trace of a creative act. Sometimes this will be overt, through the way the hand has responded to a material and left evidence of an encounter; in other works this will be subtler but will broaden the discussion. Smith and Whatmore challenge us to imagine these works as moments in what they describe as a ‘continuum of ceaseless change’, and to think about how they relate to wider issues, such as the primitive desire for touch in a post-digital culture or artists’ practices relating to the body.