Current

4 June - 28 July 2001

The featureless horizon of the ocean, the slow dissolve of artefacts and the controlled flow of water, Current is an exhibition linking the movement of water and electricity with the ‘now’ of time.


David Cushway’s work exploits our notions of time to suggest an experience of the sublime. He places a recognisable unfired clay object into water and allows it to break down into a saturated amorphous form. The resulting dissolved clay offers the potential for a replica object to be remade and the process to be repeated. Cushway is active in the cycle of creation, destruction and recreation, using clay as the medium for expression. Throughout his practice he has explored concerns ranging from the personal to the universal: from traces of the individual's presence and absence to our use of archaeology to define culture past and present, the frailty of human existence within an infinitely larger geological history.

On the first floor a large-scale video projection presents the view astern and afore a moving ship, creating a sense of endless and indeterminate movement. Mark Jackson’s work describes this journey over the ocean to consider time passing. The film echoes the structure we impose onto time: a past, which exists in our memories, a present that is immeasurable and a future imbued with hopes and expectations. Jackson sees this understanding of time as too simplistic as it denies the importance of change and duration. Rather, we should acknowledge that nothing within our perception is permanent, and instead everything exists within a state of change or evolution.

Yoko Kobayashi draws on natural medicine and eastern consciousness to reflect similarities between the flow of water and energy flows within the human body. Using glass pipes and tubes, her work intersects the space horizontally and vertically creating flow, speed and gravity with water. She creates a chemical equilibrium reminiscent of neutralising processes in the body by balancing the pH within this complex and delicate system. All the body's functions interconnect; one motion initiates another, heartbeat and breathing are an expressed in time and motion.

Current addresses potentially weighty issues of time, space and change through the honest, personal perception of the artists. The viewer encounters the work with an awareness of both their own bodily relationship to the work and the wider context of the chaotic and uncontrollable nature of what happens out of our reach. The resulting exhibition opens up a platform for discussion, putting the viewer in a position to examine his or her own relationship to the perpetual nature of change.

Programme