The Little Gallery
Exhibition Dates: October 16 – November 21 2010
Opening Friday October 15, 6pm
Trawling through skips, tip shops, antique stalls and garage sales, I am constantly in search of cast off objects of interest; the minutiae of some unknown persons lifetime.
These range from old binoculars, sighting mechanisms, bronze propellers, Bakelite instruments, discarded military ephemera, wooden oars and foundry patterns, all devoid
in their discarded form of any fixed historical narrative. These objects are merely the flotsam and jetsam of our throw away society, drifting on the tide of time’s relentless surge.
They only hint at some past journey. Yet, to me, they are anything but; they are buoyant, floating signifiers.
These “discovered” treasures, some over one hundred years of age, are safely harboured in my studio. It is here where my ideas can surface slowly, often in reference to imagined battleships or aircraft,
and evolve into my recycled sculptures. They continue to reference a sea of cultural memory, places and events, yet have transformed into evocative distortions of time and perception.
Each sculpture takes, on average, one to two years to complete. I am constantly changing parts on a weekly basis, often sitting for hours, simply discerning the relationships between objects.
However, the building process is not a laborious one; it provides an escape to an abstract and creative realm. In this state of mind, dreamlike references hover amidst imagined cultural and emotional memories.
It has become a form of meditation; one of technologies of the past, retold into one of my sculptural forms.
