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In briefAt art school in the 1980s I tried every art form I could, enthralled by the many ways of making things that could have both aesthetic and intellectual aspects. Later, I established myself as an artist using video, audio, and mixed-media installation. Twenty-five years into this career I undertook a PhD. I wanted to develop my thinking about the role of art in an increasingly scientified world, especially through writing. I gained a doctorate from Slade School of Fine Art/UCL with a written thesis: What Art and Science Want: Disciplines and Cultures in Contention (2011). I collect video and audio, make photographs and write (essays, rants, blog posts, lyrics, proposals). Whatever the material form of my exhibited work I am interested in the mixing up of discourse and emotion, and in partial perspectives on seemingly monolithic ideas, such as the scientific, the idea of culture itself, and Englishness. My work reflects an ongoing attempt to incorporate multiple positions, to escape uninterrrogated belief of any kind. I write and teach on the themes briefly covered in this statement, especially on the disciplines and cultures of art and science in the context of wider public culture. In addition to my individual practice, I work in two collaborative settings: with artist Frances Hegarty, and with artists Stefan Gec and Louise K Wilson. As well as using audio in art works, I make music. I released a first full-length album of songs and music: Mister Salmon... in Yorkshirama in 2010. At time of writing, a second is in production. This web-site is a hub and an archive for all these activities. |
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In detailI began my artistic career with a body of several hundred drawings, collages and paintings, and via grants, residencies and commissions I found ways to continue working with video and audio. Once outside the academy I developed academic interests: for instance, in the intellectual world of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the relationship between institutionalised scientific knowledge, colonialism and imperialism. I read around questions of British cultural identity and received history. I explored the confusion around heritage, tradition and nostalgia in Britain, as the integrity of nation-states began to be eroded by globalisation. I studied the social musics of different places, working my way through what would now be called the "world music" section of my local record library. [Another impression of this period, centred on my musical interests, can be found here:http://www.mistersalmon.com/TALE]
My early time-based works, especially Salmon Song (1987), grew out of adopting rules or constraints which limited the way a video camera could be manipulated. My work process often entailed crossing a terrain or space which interested me, taking a camera in some kind of trolley or harness. I treated the camera as an automatic device, collecting continuous, time-based evidence of phenomena created and revealed by the traverse itself. These cycles of action, effect and documentation yielded footage which I began to fashion into multi-screen video works. Later, I combined this approach with more conventional means of production, structure and signification. My time-based work makes explicit something common to my work in general: the use of variations in aesthetic affect or emotional intensity to convey conceptual shifts. For me this approach is related to both music and discourse, since it relies on rhythm, cause and effect, proposition and response. Given that even static marks, objects and spatial divisions must be apprehended in time, I assume that this "time-based" model is relevant to the production and reception of many kinds of artwork. In the 1980s and 90s, via a worldwide network of video art festivals, I found audiences for a series of single-screen video works, such as Common Knowledge (1989), A History of Disaster with Marvels (Channel 4 Television, 1992), Colonial Difficulties (1995), and others. From around 1989 I made installations combining video and audio with various kinds of projection and lighting, often within quasi-architectural interior constructions. Works such as Geiger (1989), Class (1990/93), Flare/Cataract (1992), The Conditions (1993) were presented in various locations around the UK, and elsewhere in Europe. Often, due to their scale and mix of technical and physical media, the pieces were shown only once or twice. My finished works usually focus an ongoing interest via exemplary images, objects or actions. In installation, I have used video, audio and other media to bring elements of the natural or social world by proxy into a place of scrutiny. I have frequently altered interiors to create a productive interplay between such proxies and the site temporarily containing them. This is the basis of my engagement with site-specific and temporary public art. Those Days Are Gone (1994) required the vaulted interior of a large gallery to be truncated and darkened by a false ceiling, cutting across taken-for-granted architectural features redolent of an earlier period. An ersatz thunderstorm played out above the ceiling, lightning intermittently flashing around its edges. Normal Numbers (1998-2008) consisted of an array of numerals and abbreviations in neon, electronically sequenced to create a flow around the top of the Manchester People's History Museum. The flow recalled the nineteeth-century use of the building as a pumping station for hydraulic power, but the text represented various cells and substances in "normal" human blood. This scientistic interpretation of the body politic contrasted with the socialistic one promoted by the Museum. I have interrogated the idea of Englishness in various ways. Crowd Control (1996/7) was a suite of gallery installations containing nineteenth-century natural history engravings, photographs related to the end of the Victorian era and the 1914-18 war, and a video clip from a televised Queen's Christmas Message. All were contextualised using laboratory equipment, early microfiche readers, modern surveillance apparatus, and customised institutional furniture. The imageless single-screen video Victorian Car Chase (2002) uses just subtitles and audio, finding a darkly comedic Englishness in the accumulated soundtrack of British cinema, TV and radio. The temporary neon work Provincially Provisionally (1998) was created to parody the fuzzily aspirational tone of administered public culture. It was installed high on the exterior of the now-demolished Sheffield Town Hall extension. Cloud Cover (1999), a suite of installations for Battersea Arts Centre, drew on population statistics, satellite-assisted weather forecasts, and live surveillance of the main foyer of BAC itself; a building designed and built as a Town Hall, with a hierarchy of access inferred in its architecture.
In 1997 I made a first collaborative work with artist Frances Hegarty. For Dublin was a multi-site, temporary neon work in Dublin city centre, and the first Nissan Art Project, in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The work was intended as both an aesthetic pleasure, and an invocation of two ideas closely associated with James Joyce's Ulysses: psychogeography and gendered speech. Hegarty & Stones have made several site-specific, temporary public art works, often bringing elements of illusion and temporal play to public locations: Seemingly So, Evidently Not, Apparently Then (Sheffield 1998); Orienteer (A-Z, Dawn to Dusk) (Birmingham 2000); Overnight Sensation (Belfast 2001); Extra (Bradford 2002/3). In 2006 we were commissioned to make the large-scale video/audio work Ex Machina in Carlow, Ireland: an artistic response to the asset-stripped remains of the recently closed Carlow Sugar Factory. Tactically Yours (Kilkenny,
2007) is a suite of four video
installations by Hegarty & Stones commissioned by the Butler
Gallery in which the tactics
of the street protestor are brought into association with a series
of combative performance drawings.
For the exhibition Midnight at Wildbrow
Hall (2007) and the photo-blog From
Wildbrow Hall I introduced the
conceit of a roving aristocratic photographer. This avatar (for "aristocratic" read "artistic")
allows me to indulge in some creative double-think: to assert
personal authorship and maintain subjective taxonomies of
meaning, even if, today, all images are destined for an unregulated
global reservoir of aesthetic tokens.
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Crowd Control 1997.
Bonington Gallery, Nottingham.
Empire
and Extinction Photowork
(detail).