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He's Got the Whole World in His Hands (Damsel), Digital photograph, 2008.
Photography by Kate V. Robertson.
'Peter et Claude: The Authentic Experience. A Celestial Drama in Two Acts.
Malaysian bats and fertilizer – Ravenous fireflies flirting – Musicians as gods – The devouring of Nature – Genital theft and circumcision – Creating a rebounding rubber sphere – Overdosing on Potassium – Death by stasis – Elton John's song for a dead icon. Curtain.'
Malaysian bats and fertilizer – Ravenous fireflies flirting – Musicians as gods – The devouring of Nature – Genital theft and circumcision – Creating a rebounding rubber sphere – Overdosing on Potassium – Death by stasis – Elton John's song for a dead icon. Curtain.'
In recent years my practice has been exploring issues of mutual dependency, abandonment and subsidization in the wake of colonial rule, through writing, print, installation and video. Conflating utterances of regret, hubris and misconception, stories of convoluted quests - chasing sentiments long since past - are given new life through re-presentations of songs, tales and found images.
An initial written element - which jumps in style from fictional speculation, to autobiographical reminiscences, to fusty historical research, quotation and pointed travelogue - forms the launching post for sculptural installations, whose many scattered parts hint at a vacated rehearsal site of theatrics. Often a lone male voice or body is adopted to recreate recognisable tyrants of Western Enlightenment - the Colonial, Anthropologist or philanthropic man of learning - to produce delirious and satirical narrative situations, during which an idiotic stasis is the most prevalent event.
A major current project, entitled Bastard Gum, begins with a recital of the perambulations of a botanical investigator who 'no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company'. As he searches out the archival remnants of the extinct Commidendrum rotundifolium tree of the island of St Helena - charting mineral monuments along the Water of Leith, and delving into the hidden tombs of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh - the narrator contemplates the repercussions of imperial expansion and its manias for 'wonderfully curious little Flora'. Journeying along the defunct Eastern Trade route to question the paradoxical urge to conserve endemic plant species from the threat of natural invaders, whilst building an airport to force a self-sustainable future of tourism on this “fragment from the wreck of an ancient world”, the white-suited individual aims to speculate on the ingrained ties of imperial hybridisation.
Focussing on the juncture at which historical truth becomes a lamentable untruth - when collective amnesia grooms atrocious thefts into bedtime stories - my practice currently has me foraging for the exclamation that renders the sun, the moon and everything in between; and the significance of the word becoming whole.
