At heart I am an ecologist of sorts, interested in the interdependencies of items and organisms within complicated systems or populations. When we look at a marshland, for instance, to make any sense of it we must grossly simplify what's actually going on: there is just too much information on display for comprehension to occur. It is at this point that we generally don one of the many available hats on the rack of specialized life today: a hydrologist sees a pause in water's trip from high to lower ground; a biologist sees a profusion of nutrients and an adaptive flora and fauna; a property developer sees flat land that is easy to build upon, but lacking in character; a holiday-maker hears the insect drone and runs for the beach… And these are just examples of the compartmental filters that we humans apply - our marsh could equally well be looked at from a fish or mosquito's viewpoint, or that of a migrating bird needing a rest while on a journey halfway around the world, not to mention the nematode or amoeba.
The ‘site’ of the work on show here isn’t a marshland, but the trail of paper and other detritus generated by our cumulative everyday lives, reconfigured into new forays, to tell new stories: scraps of printed matter are ‘reverse engineered’ into the cyan, magenta, yellow and black color components of the printing process; lightbulbs are at once symbols of the “Eureka!” birth of the scientific idea and the persistent reminder of the energy consumed in the bringing of those ideas to fruition; the egg reminds us of our implicit custodial legacy - the pledge or promise we must make that binds us to our heirs; in the cultural glut of information and image in our media-saturated age, we will always make room for the ‘one more’ of the new: polysaturated plus one.
click here for pdf of exhibition review in La Provence, 25 August, 2013