“The full reality of a thing can only arrive once the distraction associated with its surface has been removed and it returns to the abstract background from which it was created.”

 

Pigeons flying overhead, white cars passing by and fluctuations in the ambient light. A visitor chatting, the amount of cotton being produced globally and the litres of air breathed by the artist that day. All of these disparate events have been used to trigger a sculptural gesture, create a painting or control the timing of an artwork’s development. Sometimes several take place at once and play out by the artist in a performance or they are fed into an algorithm to operate automatically.  Abstract identities, subconscious and less visible backgrounds are never passive, on the contrary they are fundamental to what we perceive and process - a network, seemingly unconnected but constantly working away ad infinitum. Matter comes from here and will eventually return to here. 

 

These works delve deep into the nature of the ‘abstract’ -  events and processes taking place both in the immediate, more distant and far off environments. The abstract is not a purely aesthetic representation. It is far more than this. It is its own identity, a state of being that allows things to transcend space and time more effortlessly and in so doing enlarge the chain of causation. It works hard outside of normal fields of perception in ways we can’t even fathom.

So far and so wide is its influence that it is impossible to identify everything that abstract forms connect to or all the influences that it can have. This is true not only with regards to physical objets but non-physical entities such as politics or culture.

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‘We will look back at this time in history as an age of artificially accelerated abstractification. One where boundaries and identities flowed into each other at breakneck speed. Nature cannot adapt to this imposed rate of change fast enough as we cannot adapt fast enough to our own advances. As is always the case when the abstract reforms, the new identities will be unfamiliar from the old - physically, culturally, socially and spiritually.’