UTILITY & PURPOSE

It feels cold to the touch as it cradles in the palm of my hand reflecting the light as it shifts with the movement. The corners are rounded, it is flat, streamlined, it is pleasing to run my finger along the smooth surface negotiating the changes of form, my hand throwing shadows, across the polished metal.

    These objects are the contents of one box, in a box full of boxes. each packed with metal objects, whose contents similar but diverse in shape and form, objects in multiple, create associations in the space between – a family resemblance.

   I know the provenance of these objects. I know their temporal history, that they were designed, crafted as components for a machine. ‘The parts of a machine, a machine that made bits to go in things.’ But I have no idea which bits or to what purpose. I’m as mystified as I am about the myriad tools and gauges nestling in their velvet lined leather boxes, these out of their element, passive.

This suite of works began during the making of a short film for Victoria & Albert Museum about the traditional print process of stone lithography. An exploration of the collision between intentionality in drawing and the technicalities inherent in the lithographic process using a box of tools as source material. Tools for; observation, draftsman’s aids and tools of measurement. The tools had originally arrived with a clear set of instructions, but these were now obfuscated or missing and it occurred to me what a fundamental need I have to give purpose and order to the unfamiliar.

 I took this absence as my starting point setting out to create a suite of prints which sit together as a collection of linked pieces and whose connections come from what they absorb and echo of their companions not what they offer as subjects themselves. The images reference; pedagogical systems, disobedience, expository texts, geometry, blueprints, science fiction, Fluxus, repetition and difference, oil and water, transience and fugitive acts.

  I am making about something that belongs in the past, something that denies a satisfying logic. From a place where redundant technologies now lost, become esoteric and exist hand in hand with the complications of interpersonal histories that can’t be satisfactorily documented. The completed boxset of lithographs presents as a body of evidence although it’s not clear what its proving and it might not tell the truth.