Seecum's r'draft

Ωhms & Ωhmens Ohms & Ohmens Ωhms & Ωhmens

Power structures, societal imbalances and inequality have been persistent and ongoing themes in my work, with the political serving as the agenda, and purpose of my practice. The year was underlined with a struggle, to find a way to understand the distant links that are formed between political matter and the manifestation of the work itself. For the past year, I’ve wrestled with my practice and tried to find ways to develop a dialogue which negotiates a non-didactic or over-simplified conversation with its audience. As a result the work produced is a series of subtle statements, with political messages that are quietly (and near invisibly woven) into the work.

I work materially, creating environments and assemblages which are populated by excess amounts of collected objects, bound tenuously together in precarious synthetic string, wires and ropes. A population of excess mundanity - these materials work gravitationally together to balance themselves into a form of equilibrium. In it’s abundance - the objects are placed into positions which do not privilege the presence of one over the other. A level of equality becomes key, a dichotomy of balanced positive and negative symbols - or the gesture towards a stasis of apathy or non movement.

These materials are collected and collated over time, mostly over years - some found objects are picked up from walks within the cityscape, along the shorelines and inside parks. From the walks materials such as discarded nets, cuttlefish, chunks of burnt out charcoal, torn fabrics, used drainage pipes, industrial food cans, rubble and ropes are collected. Others are bought from hardware stores - metals such as copper tape, chicken wire, garden rope, washing lines, wood. Inexpensive Turkish or Chinese trinket stores - where odd bits/tit bits can be found - mostly plastics, fake hair, fake nails, vinyl flooring of variable textures and prints. The urban detritus becomes the source of my material manifestations. The objects are never glued down, and I suspect it’s due to my affinity with the temporal, the grey areas to every paradoxical argument.

"The commitment to mastering the material - is this because of the city or has it something to do with my generation? My peers and I are in this clutter - this vivid culmination of things, things don’t speak on their own anymore. They become a constellation. “[1]

The goals feel different to that of my parents - many of my generation float, suspended and influenced by choice and options which can at times cloud our judgement and our direction. Our attentions are spread farther afield, and this can impact to thin out our focus. What I therefore make is never what I intended it to be. I suspect my commitment is sabotaged by my lack of optimism for one singular sculpture to embody everything that I want it to say.

Through conversations with Steve, I realise that I’m operating in a generation of bricolage, creating materials out of disconnected sources which manifest digitally and physically. Many more artists such as Jason Rhodes and Iza Genkhen have been working for many more decades with similar methods of aesthetics. Though today, the digital addition to our lives has changed us from the way that we collate and relate to data, to groups, to how we receive news from abroad.

These environments start to make sense towards the ideas in what I want to construct.

My Myopia

'My Myopia' is a series of sculptures, assembled from collected items from the sides of the streets, to detritus from the sea and shop bought items such as lights and wire. The sculptures at first appear as a small island of objects, charged with coloured light and wrapped in both dried natural and synthetic substances. A combination of clutter and order, it is a tenuous balance of duality where objects merge in and out of one another.

A neon toucan sits atop a raw wooden plank with palm and banana leaves resting atop, alongside animal skins, rigging slings, plastics and a bright pink neon tube light. These objects are bound to the plank by a series of synthetic coloured wires and strings, positioned precariously but with a sense of logic. The sculpture floats in the space, highlighted by neon lights which set the sculptures aglow but masks the clarity of the objects. The viewer has to come closer in order to understand what the objects are. Upon the easels are cascading reams of hair, woven broken pieces of glass and a large bulb with the words ‘Aye’ painted onto the bottom, suspended within a woven plastic macramé basket.

'My Myopia' signifies our inability to look beyond our present contemporary society of consumer goods, objects and concepts and to perhaps see them as floating homages of aspiration - on the borders of cities, from the East to the West. It brings an uneasy meditative pause - by transforming the space with light it invites you to focus on these islands of clutter. The objects lend themselves to significance and insignificance but the work asks no more from the viewer, other than to share it’s space of meditative apathy.

I’ve been trying to find ways to weave a political discourse into the fragments of these installations. I have created these environments which set the stage for a potential voice, but I’m still in a place where I’m trying to bring focus to a subtle or strong statement which will activate these objects. I’m currently creating double printed advertising posters with hidden messages and small video clips or interviews to add into the installation.

Club Autonomie

A series of double sided printed posters, with statements that reflect the anarchist movements of the 1890’s when Martial Bourdin made his name as the first international terrorist. When a bomb blew up in his hand near the Greenwich meantime observatory in 1894, the only thing that could be found on him was a calling card for the infamous ‘Club Autonomie’ - the central meeting point for the international anarchists in London. Soon after the explosion, the club was raided and the members interrogated leading to the final closure of the club a few months later. The works are an accumulation of double sided posters which signify lost messages that come to view and disappear dependent on whether they’re held up to light. Variable clock pieces are assembled in a form of order, pebbled with shards of metallic coated glass and brass.

The installation consists mainly of posters which are in black and white, with one side featuring photographs of buildings and factories and the other - illustrations of targets and anarchist statements such as ‘Abort Labour’. These posters are suspended in the space via broom handles and string, and others are attached to the windows. Small spotlights strung up with black cable, fall behind the posters offering some light to see both sides at once. Upon the floor, rests a series of folded posters, broken glass and clock assemblages which construct a form of clock like orientation. One ‘Club Autonomie’ business card is strewn across the floor, the only indicator of it’s anarchist beginnings.

Terrorism in our contemporary times is now predominantly associated with the war upon IS and the middle East. We no longer have anarchism as a frontal feature or topic of debate, critiques upon the market and the capital are given less importance and less publicity in news of today. This installation is an attempt to see where these voices can still occur, and maybe to understand the futility in making such statements. The posters are designed to appear and disappear and due to their quiet nature they can go unnoticed. What can words do these days, and how do we operate? Are we silenced.

I would like to make the piece more of a tangled fragmentation of present day anarchism and that of the past during the Club Autonomie days. What were the concerns and how has the argument con temporised? Mainstream publications have even issued feel-good proclamations that " there is an anarchist in all of us. Deep inside we yearn to be free. “ [2] I would like to build upon these posters and make into a working office, that sits between that of an anarchists den and a branding office or advertisement agency. I would like for these posters to become more ‘Pop’ but loaded with sharp powerful statements behind it.

Soft powers and the touch, confirmed

The installation is a suspension of materials over the height of a room, constructed out of copper and black rubber wires which extend across the central gallery space. A plastic dust sheet, painted with lucid colours with it's outer edges lined with copper - becomes the main piece which hangs from the centre. The materials are largely found on domestic and commercial construction sites, but all are softly lit with white neon and LED light. It is a quiet, transparent and chaotic work - with elements of order finding it’s way through the materials.

The copper and rubber wires act as the central conducting grid which operates as the main hanging device for the work. Plastics, chicken wire, nets, rubble from construction sites, fruit wrappers, neon lights and led bulbs are balanced and suspended in the space. They are either bound to the grid, or balance from the first floor to the second. Each object has it’s own equilibrium, all supported but not glued or fixed - their permanence is provisional. Alongside these objects is a cascading 4m print which shows the text ‘Conducting Conduct’ digitally composed across it, pinned to the wall with black netting and strings. The images on the print are of recent war photos, interrupted with a dense layer of ‘+’ and ‘-‘ symbols over the top, accompanied alongside are the dates in which the photos were taken.

I’ve been a frequent flyer in the month of March, and with this i’ve had more opportunity to observe various cityscapes from the sky. They behave and resemble grids and circuit boards, the road systems operate as sprawling veins which connect and disconnect across the surface. It is a natural sprawl and we all connect to it like tiny fleeting molecules. If we were to consider ourselves as electrical currents, then we can discuss resistance, conducting, circuits, loops, disconnection - in a metaphorical way. I’d like to experiment further with this language, to manifest a discussion via drawings, sculptures, and photographs by using these electrical symbols.

In Conclusion

[1] Tutorial with Steve Rushton (2015) [2] Amster, Randall (2012) Anarchism today, Praeger Publishing