Mapping my walks, following my nose and related guides such as https://www.ceiriogvalleyshow.org.uk/ceiriog-valley/afon-ceiriog/ – a series of interconnecting peregrinations and scrambles, tracing the land’s contours, tracking rivers to their source, musing and mapping, collating mages & sounds, creating assemblages (visual conversations made from objects and materials – stuff – I find along my way) and of course chats with folk (and other creatures) I encounter, along the way over the year 2021, starting in January. Let’s see what transpires.
The Ceiriog at the boundary bridge, Llanarmon DC (looking west and upstream)
I work in a variety of media, often drawing upon collections of ‘stuff’ I have gathered over the years – materials and objects that have been discarded but that have a psychological resonance. They are suggestive to me – they speak about the possibility of a memory and also a becoming – part of the future.
Like Foucault, I am hopelessly in love with a memory as they are an “echo from another time, another place”. It is that ‘elswhere’ that I am accessing – everyone is familiar with it but my concern is that if we are not careful it may be disappearing.
Travel and particularly walking, memory and mapping are at the root of many of my works and the notion of place, transfer and spatial communication. The river where I live is an important feature in my life – rivers serve both as borders and as conduits – they are fixed boundaries and markers of territory and yet at the same time symphonic, fluvial, transient and porous – like many of our own human communication lines. Rivers are also never ending and rich in deposits of both natural and man-made material.
In this work, I have taken the idea of conduit and juxtaposed with references to geometrical laws associated with western ideas around the production of space/composition etc., The happy collisions with my random thoughts about the everyday, about the idiosyncratic, allow for new pattens to emerge from the collage process.
These smaller works I make are as much about the abuttment between the visual signs and the gap, as much as the components themselves. I often work alone but equally in collaboration as with this piece as we have spent much time together, as a family, in lock down and (paradoxically) it has been quite a creative period for us.
Bureau of Constructive Ambivalence 