Articles in Subterranean

'Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song' by Lynn Dennison

Nature is shrinking, but the signs of nature and the natural are multiplying, replacing and supplanting real "nature" Henri Levebvre

The transition from agriculture to industry, from rural living to urbanization, brings a chronic shrinkage of nature, and, at the same time, a proliferation of images of nature. Advertising sells cars, deodorant, detergents, air travel and financial services by associating products with spectacular mountainscapes, natural springs, animated swarms of petals, montages of sea, dessert, sky and forest, and lush green fields. The TV schedule is peppered with documentaries of everything from deep sea creatures to storm chasing, printed textiles are almost synonymous with pictures of flowers, and nature is treasured in the backgrounds to millions of selfies, postcards, jigsaw puzzles, greetings cards, and website stock images. 

Lynn Dennison’s new work for Sculpture Shock, Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, divides up the surface of the Rotherhithe Shaft, an impressive underground monument to Brunel’s engineering prowess, with large video projections of the river looking like a calm sea. Nature is restored to the industrial setting, here, but it is not only nature that has been reduced to an image: at the Brunel museum heavy industry itself survives only as a sign. Buildings, bridges and tunnels continue to be constructed on an ever increasing scale, of course, but the classic opposition between industry and nature, captured by Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’, has been replaced with ecological crisis and ecodesign. If Dennison’s work is a eulogy to nature, a paean to the river under threat, then it is equally a eulogy to its old adversary, the industrial. 

The transition to industrialization is mirrored in a fetishism of nature: the sentimental love of nature in modernity is an effect of the industrial revolution and an expression of it, insofar as it results from the rift between city and county, progress and tradition, work and leisure, that capitalism unbuckled. Romantic artists such as Friedrich, Constable and Wordsworth, on the cusp of industrialism, modernised culture by drawing on the semiotics of nature. Realism opposed elite cultural codes of meaning by asserting that ‘the forms of Nature speak directly’. At the end of the eighteenth century, coinciding therefore with the period of the bourgeois revolution, nature appeared as the uncoded code of emotion and feeling. Not only could a painting of leafless bushes  in the snow signify death in an apparently immediate, unlearned way; the experience of nature itself, in hillwalking, hiking and mountain climbing, for instance, became one of the central modes with which the bourgeoisie learned to feel deeply. 

Nature was the centrepiece of the modern concept of aesthetic experience. Whereas the classical theory of beauty had modelled itself on the bodies of beauties and secondarily on artworks that replicated their proportions, the revolutionary bourgeoisie turned to nature as the basis both of its theory of judgements of taste and its theory of the sublime. Nature is the utopia specific to industrialisation. This is why, like Dennison’s videos, nature was projected into the very heart of modernity by radical romantics, both as a corrective to its instrumental, calculative and exploitative industry, and as a confirmation of its democratic, subjective and expressive freedom. One of the first things that William Morris says about industry in a future Socialist society, in his essay 'A Factory As It Might Be’, is that the factory should be surrounded by vast, beautiful gardens. Each room, we might add, should look out to the river or have the river run through it.  

Landscape painting has traditionally inserted simulated windows into domestic rooms so that the interior can be blessed with views unavailable though the actual windows. Dennison’s digital installation is scaled-up, like the spectacle of an aquarium in which visitors stand face-to-face with sea creatures. Facing the wall, looking at the river, the viewer is momentarily a figure in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, turning her back to the world in order to face nature and thereby to feel. One of the most profound legacies of romanticism is the belief that this encounter is the paradigm of feeling, or at least of refined aestheticised feeling. It is the experience of nature modelled on the experience of Greek statues ripped from their original architectural, cultural and religious setting. The modern love of nature is the result of a cut, which is both a spatial dislocation from nature and a framing of nature dislocated. Putting nature in a dirty industrial setting, albeit one as refined in its own terms as the Rotherhithe shaft, is to experience that cut as an embrace.

In the era of regeneration, Brunel's shaft seems as endangered as the Thames. The shaft itself will remain in place but its setting is likely to be gentrified, as no areas of London appear immune from this monetising and cultivating process. The industrial is to be nothing but a tourist attraction and its architectural relics are bound to be repurposed for the leisure of the incoming tide. Dennison’s lapping water of the Thames will be followed up, it might be assumed, with a flood of fashionable events. Modernization eats itself, naturally, and at the moment between one crisis and other it is only proper that we should contemplate, reflect and try to feel something. Regret, perhaps, or hope, might be acceptable responses, but then so is anger, fear, love, resignation or delight. Aesthetic experience, heightened by the yoking of industry and nature, is a realm of freedom only if we can feel pleasure in the vicinity of threat. The sublime was an aesthetic experience invented by the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary phase in order, primarily, to address the pleasure felt by those protected from the deadly effects of nature or the unnatural deaths of others. 

Dennison’s work is not sublime. Can nature be sublime in the era of ecological disaster? Nature is no longer conceived primarily as simultaneously the source of life and harbouring the forces inimical to human life; nature today is conceived primarily as a victim. The closest we come to a contemporary sublime is the image of total ecological collapse that brings all human life to an end in a narrative in which technology reaches a limit in its destructive exploitation of the world. Nevertheless, Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, despite the title being taken from a line in TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, is not a modernist grievance against modernity. Nature, here, is not a ruined, barren place. The river is soft, relentlessly soothing or even happy. Dennison has created an oasis. 

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song is utopian in Henri Lefebvre’s sense, which he ascribes to parks and gardens: ‘they refer to a twofold utopia: absolute nature and pure facticity’. He explains, ‘they suggest an absolute and inaccessible nature - grottos, wind, altitude, the sea, islands - as well as facticity - the trimmed and tortured tree that serves as pure ornament’. Absolute nature is made possible by pure facticity: only when nature is cut off from use and other meanings (food, farming, real estate) and is therefore conceived as pure facticity (water, field, hill) can it be fully enjoyed aesthetically, that is as nature in the abstract. Utopia, therefore, is the experience of dislocation, like Greek statues which appear freer and more beautiful when they are carried off from the Parthenon to the museum. Nowadays the cut of utopia doesn’t require chisels and a fleet of ships, only a video camera. Utopia has been let loose: nowhere is everywhere, and it still calls on us to make the world anew. 

Written by Dave Beech

Essays, Subterranean April 29, 2019

Lynn Dennison Interviewed - Part 1 / April 27, 2015

ZK: What made you decide to become a sculptor? When did your interest in the site specific develop and how/where did this happen?

LD: Well I actually started my career as a painter after having completed a Fine Art BA at the Slade School of Art. After about eight or nine years working as a painter I started to introduce three-dimensional shapes into my work. Gradually these three-dimensional pieces took over from the two-dimensional pieces, and in the end the paintings became studies for the sculptures, and sculpture became my main focus.

My interest in the site specific really developed from my desire to introduce the moving image into my sculptures. I had been using photography with my sculptures for a while and I thought it would be interesting to introduce moving images. As I had no idea how to work with moving images and film at all I went back to university and did a Masters at Central Saint Martins and that’s when it really started. I had started off in a white cube gallery environment which I placed objects in and then projected onto, which I felt created more of a theatrical scene that the viewer stood outside of and looked at, and during the course of my masters I started to think about how I could make this experience into something more immersive that the viewer could be surrounded by completely. The forms I was projecting onto became less about something I was making myself and became more of an interaction with the space I was projecting into. In fact the first piece of site specific work I did was during my Masters course for our interim show at the V22 in Bermondsey.

ZK: Who are the artists and photographers you most admire and who have had the greatest impact on your thinking and your work?

LD: I always find that question a tricky one, immediately when someone asks me what my influences are my mind goes blank but let me try and pick out a few; Diana Thater has had an impact on me not only due to the imagery she uses to explore the relationship between humans and the natural world and the difference between untouched and manipulated nature, but also in the way she uses the space that she is exhibiting in, covering windows and light sources with coloured gels so that the viewer is aware of the space they are in. The existing architecture is important to her, it is not just a venue to exhibit her work. I think that dualism has been very influential to my work. John Stezaker whose collages and films have both influenced me talks about his fascination with an idea of a liminal or in between space, which is also something that I am exploring in my work. I like the idea of ‘the slender margin between the real and the unreal’. Another artist for whom it is important that the ‘edge’ is visible is James Casebere who creates models of environments and then photographs them to appear to be real spaces, until a closer look reveals them to be fabrications. I think one of the first things that got me interested in immersive spaces was the research project that took place at the Tate Modern between 2003 – 2010 called the ‘Sublime Object’, in particular Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project created as part of that project and also Miroslaw Balka’s work How it is commissioned for the Tate Unilever Series. Both these artists were creating immersive environments which changed the viewer’s perception of their surroundings, which is something I attempt to do with my own work.

Some photographers who have influenced my work are Noemie Goudal, who works with large photographs, usually of landscape, which she places in urban settings which are often abandoned and decaying, and Jitka Hanzlova who often explores the relationship between nature and culture; her photographs of Essen show the city being infiltrated by nature.

ZK: What is the importance of the site itself to your work and how do you incorporate the existing architectural feature into your installations?

LD: The work wouldn’t exist without the site, and I often let the site dictate what the work will be. The history and geography as well as the colours, shapes, and architectural details of a place are all part of the work. It is a collaboration really between what I am bringing to the site with my projections and what is already there. One can’t work without the other.

ZK: John G. Hanhart senior curator of film and media arts at the Smithsonian Art Museum has stated that ‘video art has a distinctive interdisciplinary quality’. Would you agree with this, and how do other artistic disciplines such as the written word or sound art play into your practice? In particular could you talk about your use of collages?

LD: Yes I would definitely agree with that statement. There seems to be a lot of space for other disciplines to interact with film and media arts. I have worked with sound artists on several occasions and also been influenced by the spoken word in the creation of my installations. I sometimes use ideas from literature in my work. For example in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthousethere is a passage in which she describes the water metaphorically seeping into the house and covering all the furniture which influenced my work Shipping News.

The collages I use to work out what I want to do in a space. I think because I had come from a painting and a sculpting background, both of which are very hands on, when I suddenly found myself editing video clips on a computer I really missed the more tactile elements of the creating process. My painting had often contained elements of collages so it was almost a natural progression that when it came to working out what I wanted to do on a three dimensional plane I did so with two dimensional collages. Although I now get the same satisfaction from editing I also love creating the collages for their own sake.

Written by Zana Kingwill

Interviews, Subterranean April 29, 2019

'Quantitative Easing' by Patrick Lowry / May 1, 2014

Sculpture Shock 2014 gets underway with Patrick Lowry’s installation Quantitative Easing, housed in the subterranean gloom of the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury. Access to the space is via a steep ramp, a reminder that the premises were built (in the late 18th century) as a treatment centre for London’s hard-working horses. Picking one’s way down the steep incline, one can imagine their hooves slipping and sliding as they anxiously negotiated the unfamiliar descent.

After the closure of the hospital, a commercial printer turned the basement into a busy print shop which continued operating until the 1980s. A concrete slab built to accommodate the heavy press is still in situ and it is this recent history which Lowry has chosen to address.

You could be fooled, in fact, into thinking he has created a museum of social history. Occupying centre stage is a large Heidelberg Offset press of the kind used in the print shop. Did the printers leave it behind because it was too heavy to move?

Rather than a trip down memory lane, though, this exhibition is a multi-layered investigation of the smoke and mirrors world of contemporary finance. Despite being utterly convincing, the printing press turns out to be made from sheets of MDF painted grey to resemble steel. The pressure dial was created on photo-shop and its “glass” cover is the plastic lid of a yoghourt pot; one lever is a foot rest from a BMX bike, others are made from lengths of dowelling; the discs that crank the bed up and down are the bases of stainless steel food bowls found in Wickes.

Thrown over the bed is a grey blanket of the kind used by removal firms; lift up one corner and, in place of the heavy rollers you expect to see, there is an immaculate void.
The duplicity does not end there. Apparently, the fake press has been printing euro bank notes, some of which are still drying while others are packed ready for shipment. Have we stumbled into a criminal underworld of forgers and counterfeiters? Things are not that clear cut. With central banks stimulating local economies by printing money – the Quantitative Easing of the title – and bankers generating millions by selling virtual commodities to imaginary buyers, the border between the legal and illicit seems remarkably elastic. Whether they like it or not, artists are sucked into this murky realm by producing work that, despite having no actual use, might one day become an investment opportunity. 

Art has always dealt in illusion and, when nothing serious is at stake, being fooled is a delight; but Lowry’s installation generates more than pure pleasure. He seduces us into considering the part played by illusion in other areas of activity, such as global finance, that have a profound impact on our lives – where our willingness to be duped becomes a political issue, rather than a self-reflective game.

Written by Sarah Kent
Interviews, Subterranean April 29, 2019

Notes from the Studio – Patrick Lowry   / May 1, 2014

What made you decide to become an artist

PL: Actually, I am doing the same thing now as I did when I was a child of 8.  I was always drawing and making three-dimensional objects with bits and pieces I found. At school I did not manage to excel as my academic path was hindered by severe dyslexia. 
It was the art and design department which showed me the way towards something I enjoyed and was good at.  I left school and started an art Foundation course, but started to panic about being a fine artist.  I thought it would drive me mad with its lack of boundaries and structure. So, I went on to do my first degree in product design at the Surrey College of Art and Design in 1971. 
I worked for 10 years designing electrical equipment at Philips which gave me parameters and a path.
Ultimately, though, I hated the commercialism of it and the futility of it – new plastic boxes for the same old content. I left to set up my own design practice but doing this and having twins simultaneously proved bad timing.  I re-found my artistic path by chance when I applied for a job in Cornwall teaching design on the foundation course at Cornwall College. Being back in an art and design environment made me realise I needed to re visit my passion for art and I went on take my Masters at Falmouth College of Arts in 2003, where I am now a visiting lecturer.   

Your work appears meticulously executed, so much so that it fools the viewer into thinking it is real.  Is the craftsmanship essential to your work? 

PL: The work appears so, but appearances are deceptive.  I am not aiming to make perfect functioning replicas, but to do enough to make the work believable as an entity in its own right. In fact, I am selective about what is important to include visually, even if this is not important to the functionality of the real thing.  For American Dream, I made a replica of a 1950s American suburban home complete with Chevrolet Bel Air parked outside. I have never seen a Bel Air but from photographs and models I chose the aspects that made it believable – it is the impression of reality that counts.

I am not a highly skilled craftsman or maker – in fact, I find the making process very laborious (and often tedious). It is an essential process for me as it makes me think through all aspects of the object/installation and its meanings and implications.  The process of cutting, gluing, sanding and painting and the analyses of the subject needed to replicate it brings me closer to the subject matter and the commentary I am trying to convey.

What are your views on the debate around the artist’s hand vs the use of fabricators?

I have always made my works myself by hand as I believe that the process of making somehow imbues the objects with some of the thought processes that I went through.  I have never used real manufactured objects as they simply do not have the same visual or intellectual effect on the audience.  Presenting the audience with the real object can quickly close down audience engagement: they know what it is so questions ask no more questions.  The shift from initially believing they know what they are looking at to the realisation that the work is a facsimile makes them reassess and hopefully re-engage with what the work is about. There is no right or wrong to using ready mades or fabricated objects – it just depends on the message an artist wants to convey. I am dealing with the intricacies of illusion, which I must create myself otherwise there is no illusion, just bare reality.

What is the usual course of events leading to the creation of a new work?

PL:  The Sculpture Shock residency has turned my usual process on its head.  I usually find the object or scenario and then locate a site which allows me to present it so that the message is clear.

For Escalator, I was meandering in Toulouse when I happened upon the construction of an escalator entrance to the underground system, which I had no idea existed. It seemed so out of context in the middle of a quiet tree lined pavement with no other clues to what it was doing there. Some months later, I was thinking about making a work about the unquestioned decision making of governments and local authorities and how it resonated with the archetypal but now fading 60s architectural statement of Cornwall’s County Hall.

In terms of process, I make drawings, many drawings:  they are not observational but technical.  They contain measurements, details of construction techniques, materials. I make films of my subject matter - the audio of most end with, “Excuse me, Sir, you can’t do that here” before jolting to a close.  I take photographs:  from every accessible angle.  I need to understand the thing I am replicating. This points me to what is important about its meaning and how I can convey my message through it.

Why is site specificity so important to your work?  Have you ever placed work in a gallery?

PL:  The site is the key.  There are certain places that provide the perfect context to convey the message.  I placed Escalator in the large open foyer area of the Cornwall County Hall in Truro and installed it over a weekend when the building was largely empty.  (I had permission, of course, to install an ‘art exhibition’).  It was the perfect location to comment on the invisibility of decision makers, the slow but steady descent of our economy and the fabric of our society as I perceive it.  The tarpaulins draped over the work pointed to the familiar and exasperating norm of public building works being abandoned midway or decisions never taken to their conclusion. I had to carefully consider what to do when invited to show this work in a gallery and had to substantially remake the work to establish a new narrative.

Cash Machine, on the other hand was installed in the Leeds Metropolitan University Gallery and carefully placed in a discrete corner of the gallery.  It worked well in this space as it was incongruous and yet such a familiar part of our lives that it confused the audience enough to question it and then their own relationship with the cash machine, with money which is seemingly on tap and our culture of desire, our obsession with spending.

Clearly your work engages directly with debates surrounding the simulacrum, the real and the copy.  The history of art since Plato has largely been about representing the real, be it in naturalistic or abstract terms.  The simulacrum subverts the relationships of real and copy, original and reproduction, image and likeness all of which affirm the status of the real.  Meanwhile, the simulacrum, a copy without a true original – an imitation without roots in the real has been regarded negatively, until its adoption by postmodern and post structural theorists in the late 1960s. For Baudrillard, simulacra blur the distinction between reality and reproduction as they produce as simulated experience of the contemporary world.   As the world became (and remains) deluged with images, simulacra were (and are) employed by artists for different ends.  Why do you employ simulacra?

PL:  As an industrial designer, I was not selling the technology of a product, I was selling the belief that the new product, which was more often than not just the old product repackaged, was better.  I was selling a new reality again and again and the world was buying into that illusion, in fact they were buying the illusion. Illusions increasingly form the reality in which we live.  We are more and more physically detached from reality so what I attempt to do is to question this situation by presenting an object which looks real, but is not.  Some viewers are happy to accept the Chevrolet as a real car as we are so attuned to recognising things through signs and images.  For others, there is a jarring realisation that their eyes/mind are misreading the object and by extension the world.

I hope that initially the audience will believe that my work is the real thing.  I am interested in the point at which realisation dawns that it is not.  That is when the viewer starts to think about the meaning of the work.  It is the moment that the brain shifts from acceptance to questioning, from one model of belief to another.  I hope the audience experience that. 

What are your thoughts around the subterranean in relation to your work?

PL:  For me, the subterranean conjures up images of the underworld, the black market world of forgery, fakes and counterfeit.  Interestingly, the building itself is subterranean but has this other overwhelming association with being a horse hospital.  I intend to look beyond this and into other uses of the building, including from the 1920s to about 30 years ago as a commercial printers.  I am deeply interested in the power structures surrounding the economic crash, the powerlessness of the individual and the dematerialisation of money.  I am exploring the effect of cash becoming obsolete for our physical and aesthetic experience of the world. 

Which artists have most influenced you and which do you most admire?

PL: I’m not sure I have any direct influences and my interest in artists changes, sometimes it might just be an individual work that catches my attention. There are a range of artists that I find myself re visiting, several of which don’t work in 3 dimensions, I feel there is an overlap with Thomas Demands work both in content and process, he take what appears to be the mundane and everyday but behind which there is something else, Gerhard Richter, from the things I have read, when talking about his work, there is a refreshing uncertainty and contradiction. I’m always a bit suspicious of an artist that seems to be very clear about what they are doing, certainty is not the business we are in. Gabriel Orozco, Gavin Turk, Jeff Wall, Edward Hopper, Matthies Weischer, Fischli & Weiss, Peter Doge, Richard Wilson, all spring to mind, in no particular order.

Given the temporary nature of your work, how do you feel about photographic reproductions of your work?

I do of course like people to physically engage with the work and that is its original intention. In reality, the majority of artists’ work, not just mine are only ever seen as two-dimensional reproductions, and I would rather that than it not being seen at all. Thomas Demand whose work I find interesting is of course exploring the whole question of real and reproduced, starting with a found image translating it into 3D and then finally back into a photograph - we never see the 3D work in reality.

What is your message in Crushing the Tate?

The title of this work might at first seem to be making a derogatory comment but it is not meant to.  It refers to having to reduce the scale of the Tate stairs to be able to get even a single floor of the stairs into the small Bikini Gallery. The work was really about the art ecology and that small independent contemporary galleries play as an important part in the dynamics of the art world as the big institutions like the Tate. I think at the time I made reference to it being like the plankton and the whale, the whale would not survive without the plankton.

Notes from the Studio April 29, 2019

Notes from the Studio – David Ogle / April 1, 2013

Have you always had an interest in technology?

It seems that when any ‘technology’ reaches a level of ubiquity or domesticity it stops being referred to as ‘technology’ at all and fades into the background, becoming just another mechanism of everyday life. There is an inherent link between technologies and the idea of the future and also a natural link between technology and illusion, as Sir Arthur C Clarke author of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) wrote, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and there is an element of trying to harness this in my work.

What appealed to you about Sculpture Shock award?

The focus on specific sites was really the thing that most drew me to the award. With so much of my work being a reaction to an environment, this project seemed to demand a quite interrogative approach to the exhibition venues and this certainly seemed to tie in with the way I had been working and the way in which I see my practice as progressing.

What was your inspiration for the Sculpture Shock commission?

To me there is something about underground spaces that has this sense of exploration, of seeking out something valuable, like a mine or a tomb. I wanted to consider underground light at its most precious and how living things are changed, blocked off from the sun, when they journey down beneath the surface.

Could you explain the process of creating one of your installations from drawing to realisation?

My installation works almost always begin as drawing on paper, in fact, the installations themselves are often attempts to further explore a process that has been carried out in two dimensions. Revealing an underlying process or set of operations that make up the work is key and manifesting this as something that a viewer can physically or spatially experience is what progresses the work from drawing into installation. Thinking about the procedural properties of a 2D work that I want to explore, I create a three dimensional computer model of the specific space that I will be using and test out different approaches to realising the drawing in a sculptural form. This is then constructed within the space, replaying the system of the drawing across an environment.

You are currently researching for a PhD in Liverpool on a very sophisticated and ground-breaking area namely the use of new media technologies in the cultural sphere.

Is there is a fundamental paradox in your work in your in-depth understanding of very sophisticated technological and scientific areas and the very low-tech use of materials?

I find the critical debates surrounding new media and its cultural implications very interesting, particularly the ways in which established notions of space and materiality become undermined.
For a time I did work entirely digitally, producing interactive video installation works, but I often found that the computer imposes very strict parameters. The screen has become such a ubiquitous means of experience that it can cease to challenge a viewer.

Our senses are actually more receptive to a physical confrontation in real-space. I feel that my work does reference technology, the grids, planes and strict mathematical ordering - but this is perhaps on a purely aesthetic level.

What impact do you hope to have on the viewer with your new commission?

Site specific work puts the viewer into an environment that is unknown. When work is exhibited in a gallery, the space itself is always fulfilling its established function and I feel that this can cast certain preconceptions onto the experience of the work. Within a space previously inhabited for a different function, the installation of art objects strip the space of this previous role, it loses its utility;  not an industrial site but not a gallery either. It hangs precariously between the two. I think this tension is interesting for audiences, and can allow a unique experience of a site. 

Your installations are all temporary. How do you feel about their impermanence?

I like the ephemeral nature of much of my work, I see them more as events or interventions than objects. A set of procedures are played out within the space, it exists for a while and then it is destroyed. Then, in another place, at another the time, those same operations can be ‘re-activated’ the work coming into being again.  Each time the work is made anew, dictated by the surroundings in which it appears; the system, the blueprint or its making surviving after each of the works are demolished.
The transient nature of my work is central to their numerical titles. As numbers can increase infinitely, it shows each work as part of an on-going system, cataloguing work that no longer exists.  Perhaps the numbering allows a degree of detachment when it comes to dismantling a piece at the end of an exhibition. As my second solo exhibition, the title of my Sculpture Shock exhibition will be ‘00002’.

Could you explain the importance of colour in your work?

There is a blue that I use in many of my installation pieces and I think that has partly been influenced by some of Yves Klein’s writing. Discussing the different associative properties of colour, Klein wrote that in nature, blue represents that which is most abstract, hinting at the sea and the sky, entities that exist on a scale that defy physical comprehension. On a less lofty note, I tend to draw in blue ball point pen so the colour further references the drawings that inspire the installations. 

Who are the artists you most admire and which have had the greatest impact on your thinking and your work?

The work and writing of Sol Lewitt was a big influence when I first began working with serial systems and processes. The sets of instructions used to create his wall drawings have had a big impact on the way I think about my own work. West Coast light and space artists such as James Turrell and Robert Irwin have also had a big impact, as well as younger light artists such as Carlo Bernardini who makes fantastic architectural light pieces. I am currently interested in Haroon Mirza. He makes kinetic sound sculptures from disparate sets of objects.

Notes from the Studio April 29, 2019