Inundate (HNY)

 

All Images: West Leicester, December 2020

On the following day, the deluge abated.  Plummeting temperatures quickened the senses.  Crystalline illumination filled the city - sliding across sodden concrete and slick tarmac.  A high-contrast mirror zone assembled itself from polygonal sheets of white light and tessellating wedges of shadow - a world become polygonal and facetted.   

Catastrophes can operate at differing scales.  Down here, some micro-event may model multiple macro crises.  A shimmering metaphor inverts the familiar.  A subtracted portion of the norm requires careful negotiation.  Measures must be taken; restriction - imposed; ad-hoc precautions - carefully followed.  The lower reaches are littered with hastily-assembled emblems and beacons - inviting cautious interpretation.  A conical depth gauge is improvised, and direction attempted.  We might wadethrough the implications.  "When will they ever fix this?" - a question casually imparted through a dropped window.  A moment's hesitant assessment - prior to the submersion of brakes.  A wake settles over extended minutes; a surface is reinstated.

Some remedy may yet emerge.  This route is not yet abandoned, and can be restored.  Habitable territory may be reclaimed.  The decline lies in the shadow of dank cliffs, but the up-ramp forms a bright elevator.  Light inundates the upper level, even as water has below.  Down here we stand at a corner of time, and new traditions must assemble as days extend from this point.

Happy New Year.     

Pretty, Vacant 7

 

All Images: Central Leicester, December 2020

This piece takes the form of a meticulously-assembled diorama - describing a section of unspecified, post-catastrophic urban territory.  The piece is largely constructed from modular, architectonic elements, which form the stable, orderly grid on which the city is established.  Individual components have been organised within envelopes of standardised dimensions and format, to create an arrangement of blocks, segmented by the network of communicating channels and pathways running between them.  

At the lower levels, we see that this basic structure appears relatively stable.  However, as our eyes travel upward, we observe how forces of entropy, disruption, and 'problematic events', increasingly serve to randomise a once-orderly scene.  Our gaze travels across the details of a chaotic terrain of scattered fragments and churned debris.  The networks are broken; the grids - destabilised.  We witness the breakdown of boundaries, the bursting of perceived containers of civilisation, and the resultant dispersal of the previously ordered contents within.  Amongst the already familiar components, we discern how elements one might regard as unrelated (or at least peripheral) to he city's overall formation, are pitched into the mix.  The new interactions thus created are both unfamiliar and disturbing, and we can only guess at the new situations of disquiet playing out in their shadows and concealed recesses.

Cleverly, this scene has been designed to be viewed from multiple viewpoints.  The play of our own perceived reality across the immediate glazed surface leads to inevitable reflection on the relationship between what lays both within and without.  However, we should also ensure we take in the view beyond too.  Seen in this manner, and from certain angles, a potentially perplexing scalar continuity between interior and exterior features emerges.  The separation between depicted events, and our own 'situation' (macro vs micro-crisis) becomes harder to discern.  Ultimately, we are invited to consider whether this exhibit presages events to come, or constitutes an instructive diagram of the mechanisms of disaster, and a model for their effective negotiation.  A third possibility, of course, is that the piece simply represents another, stylish episode of post-apocalyptic [1.] spectacle, of the sort to which we have all become addicted in recent years.

[1.]:  An oft-misused terminological impossibility - as should surely be recognised at this stage.  The degree to which our culture now recycles escapist visions of its own collapse, is clearly of direct relevance here, and a matter worthy of discussion elsewhere - no doubt.

Light Relief (Season's Greetings)

 

All Images: December 2020

This year (of all years), it feels only right we should shelve irony for a moment, and take whatever pleasure we can from the simple things - like cheery coloured lights.

Have the best Christmas possible, everybody.

(With thanks to Woolaton Hall, Nottingham, and to residents of Thurmaston & New Parks, Leicester - for making the effort).

Pretty, Vacant 6

 

All Images:  Central Leicester, December 2020

1:  What is the true relationship between consumption, control, and preservation?

2:  Can you have your pudding, until you've received your just des(s)erts?

  

3:  Does the unusual and fortuitous conjoining of multiple favoured motifs promote unification,           or multiply complexity?

4:  How might meaning and serendipity intersect?

5:  Are some monoliths hiding in plain sight/site?

6:  Do Ghost Sentinels exist?

Unboxing 3: Dangerous Goods Manifest

 

Leicester, December 2020

There's probably a limit to how many of these workplace-derived 'Unboxing' posts I can belabour you with - at least without a bit of creative manipulation of the source imagery.  Nevertheless, I remain deeply attracted to the honest simplicity and truth-to-materials of the honest brown cardboard box, and to the emblematic symbology and potentially allusive texts which adhere to them.  These particular examples were especially 'thrilling' as (unusually), they contained a potentially hazardous chemical, and demonstrate the double-boxing, stern, graphic warnings, and 'Dangerous Goods Manifest' attendant on such a deadly cargo.  For the record, the product in question was a single bottle of Isopropanol - hardly plutonium, but at least: no couriers were harmed in the making of this blog post.

As soon as I have unpacked such consignments, the boxes generally get casually stacked in the corner of the classroom - awaiting recycling.  Even at this scale - with only two elements of modest scale, a distinctly totemic quality begins to emerge.  Indeed, I'm reminded that this is exactly how the format of 2018's 'Sentinel' sculptures originated - almost by accident.

'Sentinel' Sculptures, 'Visions of a Free-Floating Island', Surface Gallery, Nottingham,
September 2018

Perhaps there may be some tentative connection between those pieces, and the spate of mysteriously emerging monoliths, at various international locations, a couple of weeks back.  The reporting of those (beginning with what may have been some kind of oblique art-prank in remotest Utah) appears to have dwindled already.  That makes me think the whole thing was little more than an online meme that failed to really catch hold - particularly as the vaguely unworldly examples at a handful of locations, were joined by reports of a puerile, and far-too-representational, phallic example in Germany.  I suspect we'll soon file the memory of 2020's monoliths away with crop circles, and the like (if we remember them at all).  It does emphasise the enduring fascination of totemic, columnar forms, in the human imagination, nonetheless.

Meanwhile, the primordial urge to stack up cardboard boxes; well, that's something altogether more profound - clearly.

Completed Painting: 'Untitled 7 (Constructed City)'

'Untitled 7 (Constructed City)', Acrylics on Panel, 60 cm x 60 cm, 2020

Here's the latest of my 'Untitled (Constructed City)' paintings.  It's the seventh in the current run - and the third to be developed from purely digital origins.  One can always see things one might have done differently, but I think I'm reasonably satisfied with it - for now, at least.  As ever, it will take a while to make any kind of meaningful judgement about that.  Luckily, there are two more currently in progress.  Attention can shift immediately to them, while this one settles for a while.  

There are a few technicalities possibly worth noting. The image is distilled from two superimposed photos of emerging buildings in the skeletal, steelwork phase of their construction.  As with the two preceding paintings, the main formal concern is to achieve some kind of dialogue between negative and positive shapes/spaces.  The degree of abstraction is pretty far advanced here, but with just enough specific detail to tentatively recall the original subject.  I'm pretty happy with the largely monochromatic palette - and with the fact that those fleeting accents of red and yellow relate to the primaries often found on construction sites (being actually fluorescent colours, in this case.  I think the inclusion of silver possibly works better here, than in '6', although - as ever, one can only really judge that by observing the play of light on the actual piece.  Pretty obviously, it makes some reference to the metallic sheen of various materials found on any construction site (although the steels themselves are generally painted). 

One last point worth making, is that this image appears to move a little closer to a state in which it could be read in either the vertical or horizontal plane.  That seems important, given some of my previous observations about how many of these major new buildings fill in both sections of the visual skyline, and sections of terrain, as plotted on a map.