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All of my work relates in some way to the quality of experience that has been described as “The Sublime”. This is an idea with a lot of history to it. My work deals with this history, as well as my own feelings about what the sublime might mean. There is no doubt that the cultural history which we all share is an important factor when looking at such a concept, the sublime has been described by a number of commentators as the quintessential preoccupation of modernism. However I feel that there is also something universal about the attraction of the sublime, a lot of my recent work is inspired by the fact that the human mind has always longed for this quality, has always struggled to encapsulate it in its creations, and yet so often this fails, so often we fail to experience the sublime, and we fail in our attempts to express it to ourselves or to others. This should not be surprising, ever since the concept was first proposed by scholars of rhetoric in ancient Greece the sublime has been talked about in terms of the inexpressible. In spite of this we continue to struggle for an experience of the sublime and for some form of expression capable of capturing it, some way to keep it and hold it close forever. A large part of what we call “kitsch” is a result of such failed attempts to encapsulate the profound. For me there's something tragic in this yearning for such an un-presentable concept, maybe even pathetic, but there's also something heroic in the persistence of the sublime impulse. Whereas my work once attempted to capture the essence of the sublime, now it uses the visual rhetoric of the sublime to explore those aspects of self that conspire to frustrate our experience of it.
This work has led me to look closely at the history of the culture that made me what I am. My work is based on a wide range of sources taken from this history, and this has often raised the question of information; how do these stories relate, if at all, to the piece? I have no interest in telling these stories per se (I am interested in the more elusive subject that lies behind them), so I have always looked for ways to escape language. One way I have done this is by creating objects. While it's true that an object can carry meaning as well as any other form I believe that it must also retain the sheer physical fact of its existence as a real solid thing outside of interpretation. This is not true of images, or texts, in which the information involved transcends their physical form. Recently I have become interested in the idea of lying, in the subversion of various types of information that we are accustomed to trust. In the case of my installation piece Inconsolable it was the information presented by an apparently didactic exhibit, presented in the form of a leaflet and website that “explained” the installation. This information was at the best unreliable. The same installation included video footage of a mountain range in Colorado . The “Inconsolable Range” does not in fact exist, I built it entirely in a computer. In recent image based pieces; the King Wave series and 50 Views of H.M.S. Belfast , it is the reliability of photographic knowledge that has been brought into question by digital manipulation of the images. It is the ability of the computer to lie very convincingly that has made me interested in adding it to the list of tools that I use to create my work.
Ultimately, my work is designed to remind the viewer that she is in the presence of artifice, that this work is attempting to present something of a profound nature, but that it is failing because of its connections to the concrete. In this the viewer recognizes her own condition. |
