Instance of passages

About

We see colours, we hear sounds and we taste flavours. Some elements of the world are perceived through a particular sense. Others are perceived through more than one. But what sense is used to perceive time? Time is not associated with any one specific sense. If our sensory system was prevented from functioning for an instant, we would still notice the passing of time through our changing patterns of thought. The two projects in this solo show explore ways in which we notice and apprehend time through our perception of other entities, through shifts and transformations of the elements and matter that surround us. The result of a geological and historical investigation, The Outsiders1 project approaches the past as a terrain ripe for exploration. The installation presents excavated remnants from a shifting landscape, the eroding cliffs of Northern France, and brings to light historical traces of human migration in France. Similarly, in the darkness of the gallery's basement, a series of tactile and interactive maps respond to a scenario envisaged by T J Cox et Avi Loeb, astrophysicists at the Harvard Smithsonian centre. The Flat hemispheres installation represents astral particles in a series of phases as the Milky Way collides with the galaxy Andromeda. The narratives of both these projects freewheel through a space where fiction and documentary merge with one another; they show how the past forms our spatiotemporal environment and how perceptions of this present influence ideas of the future. The two installations were developed and realised during two separate art residencies earlier in 2011. The interactive behaviour of the textile surfaces in Flat hemispheres was developed at the tufting studio of the Textile Lab at the Audax Textiel Museum in the Netherlands and then produced by the tufter Hester Onijs. While the research for the installation The Outsiders was undertaken from March to June 2011 at the Cité Internationale de la Dentelle, in Calais, France.