the camera rearranging pre_existing material
king aurthur’s moor. from place to place. light drawing. a non-intrusive intervention originally carried out on dungeness beach. a project proposition for king arthur’s hall, bodmin moor. light sculpture
allegorical contemplation [konstructive montage's precursor] aims at the ruination of things so that it can, in its redemptive moment, construct [baun] a new whole out of the elements of the old. the character of this construction distinguishes it from the creative invention of fantasy, since it manipulates and rearranges pre-existing material. to leave an imprint or impression of this construction [konstruktion] is one of its aims. it is not the aim (like so much archaeology) to reconstruct an empathitic pre-history but the grasp elements as they are constituted in the present out of that history.
through photography. the camera is the perceptual instrument through which this world is opened up and provides knowledge of how to act within it, and aids insight and insures us an unexpected expanded field of of action (benjamin) (this has been a steady build up material and I'm only at the beginning of bringing this wealth of material into the work)
benjamin asserts that photography has the ability to bring things close and place them to perceptual tests and this leads to a deepening of apperception- 'the mind’s eye, through the camera, reconfigures things already experienced'.
through paint-works. the paint works are intended to form one part of this active engagement. attempting a contemporary praxis that is 'innervated' by the prehistoric. to rub penwith's 'primordial landscape' against the grain of 'modernist' art practice. (first exhibition at spinage london november 2012.)
through montage. gathering up this material into a temporary constellation. to allow a montage of past embodied material - primordial land-scapes in all their contexts and conditions - to present itself as a unreconciled synthesis, and open the work to new content and the potential to construct new meanings. to let this synthesis emerge through the work. (the work shown here is the result of the first run at this mode of working and it is by its nature provisional)
the persistence of memory revealed in penwith's megalithic remains is a record of things strangely familiar, simultaneously ancient and modern. the work attempts a conspicuous and conscious juxtaposition of this material, its re-appropriation in new artefactual production, a time jump that attempts a reclamation of the present as strange, mythic and magical.