Set Your Chattters to Hum – Arts Based Masters Final Show

Birmingham School of Art, 5th – 12th September 2014

The title for the show ‘Set your Chattters To  Hum’ was taken from a line of the poetry in ‘Black Sun’. A series of six textual works presented in the light emanating from the monumental work ‘Can the Body Enter?’.

The works here explore the relationship between text, photography and material. The role of light and darkness, shadow and intensity, surface and object. Is there a boundary between dark and light? Hegel would say that it is at the moment of difference (between dark and light) where one finds determinate being (dasein).

“Can the Body enter?”

12’x 8’ x 2’ MDF, Emulsion                                 Installation POA

60”x40” Photograph Digital C-Type Print, Kodak Metallic Endura Paper Mounted on Aluminium                                   Image £800

Light has an intention of revelation. Yet here it provides concealment, hiddenness and reveals the surrounding space and surfaces not the object. Clouds occlude the sun, the source of all things we experience, the object to which we owe our existence. It may be said that total light or total darkness afford transcendence, taking one into a realm of only space, yet that space is concealed. We discover space through the interruptions of objects.

‘In Between’

60”x40” Photograph Digital C-Type Print, Kodak Metallic Endura Paper on Dibond Aluminium. 12 V LED Strip light               £800

‘The Thickness of Shadows’

Series of 7 approx :18”x12”x8”, 12”x12”x8” Photograph Digital C-Type Print, Kodak Metallic Endura Paper Mounted on MDF Boxes 12 V LED strip lights                                            £800 (£150 individual)

“Black Sun”

Silk Screen Print 40″ x 30″  Fabriano Tiepolo Cotton Rag Paper £80       …………………………………………Also available as Set of 6 Cards £ 30

In the same way, words can conflict. Even a word when it acts as a signifier it does not reveal the whole truth. Words appear to have power over the image – even the words written here may affect the way one experiences the work. They may be informative of the artist’s intentions or disruptive to our own interpretation. The juxtaposition of both text and image is here transient in the mind. It is the lingering memory of the space, text and image which creates the whole work.

‘But one pictures being to oneself, perhaps in the image of pure light as the clarity of undimmed seeing, and then nothing as pure night – and their distinction is linked with this very familiar, sensuous difference. But as a matter of fact, if this seeing is more exactly imagined, one can readily perceive that in absolute clearness there is seen just as much, and as little in absolute darkness, that the one seeing is as good as the other, that pure seeing is a seeing of nothing.’ Hegel, on being in ‘The Science of Logic’

Pure light and pure darkness are two voids which are the same thing.”

(In bright light you can see nothing)

‘Something can be distinguished only in determinate light or darkness. (light is determined by darkness, and so is darkened light, and so darkness is determined by light, which is illuminated darkness), and for this reason, that it is only darkened light and illuminated darkness which have within themselves the moment of difference and are therefore determinate being.’