Statement, June 2007

In "A Voyage to the North Sea." Rosalind Krauss writes "Museums are materialised memories… where memory is tied to matter." The last few years has seen large numbers of old manufacturing machines being lost to the scrapyard of history and the few that remain lingering in museums as empty, silent husks, polished and de-texturised for the tourists gaze.

D. Massey 1 in "Place, Space and Gender," writes, "…de-industrialisation has accelerated and spread to all manufacturing sectors where the older means of manufacturing has seen capacity closure and technical change, resulting in employment decline, especially in male skilled and semi-skilled workers."

Produced from materials of a fragile and finite nature my work addresses a range of issues including the rapidly changing nature of the capitalist industrial world and the globalised industrial working environment. It is concerned with the loss of skills and jobs from our traditional manufacturing base and the perpetuation of the social working class system.

Using cardboard, tin cans, plastics and cardboard tubes my fragile resemblances with their torn, folded and glued sections are crude, insubstantial, sometimes spray-painted copies, three-dimensional jigsaws, connected and disconnected fragments of machines displayed as museum artefacts. They are intended as a metaphor for the passing of time and a representation of the old industry that has succumbed to the forces of globalisation. The models are devoid of working parts, like the deserted factory buildings devoid of workers and machines. They portray the hopelessness of redundancy, loss of skills and the capricious nature of employment and empty promises of a better future.

Tim Edensor 2 comments on the industrial ruin:  "The rusting machines are now only clues to past human endeavours, the remains referencing signs, which seem to embody historical process and the temporality of existence. Such objects, surviving their original context, are seen as traces of the way of life that once surrounded them. They are allegorical echoes, embedded in the ruined and discarded that begin at the end of things and overwhelm the ordinary flow of time with memories and nostalgia."

My work references issues addressed within Arte Povera primarily, using heterogeneous, pre-used and "found" materials and simple techniques. Bruce Nauman, 4 commented, "that Arte Povera had to do with trying to make a less important thing to look at…diverting minimal art in an eccentric direction." One of Nauman's early sculptures was written about appreciatively by Fidel Danieli 5 as "One of the shabbiest pieces of construction to pass as a finished work."
Characterising the aesthetics of Arte Povera Mario Merz 3 wrote that it "employed …commercial, technological and manufacturing materials to represent an artistic idea." Thinking of their work in political terms, their use of cardboard and other humble materials became a metaphor for the elevation of the underprivileged social classes. Poor materials such as cardboard stand in dramatic opposition to the hegemony of the "High" art, monumental materials of the past such as bronze and marble.

References.

1. Massey. D. 1998 "Space, Place and Gender." (P73/91) Polity Press. Cambridge.
2. Edinsor. T. "Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality." (P119) Burg Publishers.
3. Sandler. I. "Art of the Postmodern Era." (P103) Westview Press, 1998.
4. Ibid (P30)
5. Ibid (P30)