Point of departure

21 February - 27 March 2004

Sara Fletcher & Ed Adam

Time passes and we constantly move from one state to another. ‘Point of departure’ presents the works of artists whose work explores moments arrived at, experienced, and passed. From breath to breath, the present constantly shifts into the past as we move toward the future. But what happens when the moment is unexpected, sudden or inexplicable? Then the future that we move into becomes uncertain, unstable and traumatic. The artists deal with these ideas of ruptured continuums.

Jo Berry recreates the chance sighting. Her series of appropriated video stills or newspaper images of car crashes or the beast of Bodmin Moor aspire to catch the moment. She draws out the moment through a careful reconstruction of the scene using airbrush techniques, expanding the original snatched glimpse to a lingering voyeuristic gaze.

Sara Fletcher’s work is oracle-like. Focussing on two strands of artifice, it recalls early séances that utilised cunning props or trick photography to heighten the theatrical experience. Sara has used early cinematic and theatre techniques to reinvestigate their use in demonstrating the impossible. Recordings are made via a homemade transistor, questions asked and responses hinted at in the resulting white noise. This work is affected with slight interventions to convince the listener of barely discernible voices.

The poignancy of the passing of close ones is given a dramatic twist by Emma Thatcher. Her work looks at the unexplained phenomenon of spontaneous combustion. The sensational documentation of the aftermath has the familiar grittiness of documentation of the unexplained. Something inexplicable appears to have happened, yet it is another fact of living. The difference between existing and not existing as a conscious presence within the flesh and blood shell is very small.

These points of departure are also points of arrival. Our yearning to understand what lies beyond a moment, an encounter, an ending, and where they take us will ultimately become a direct experience; an arrival at individual knowledge, or nothing.

The following Artists were in this show:

Jo Berry
Sara Fletcher
Emma Thatcher

Point of departure

21 February - 27 March 2004

Sara Fletcher & Ed Adam

Programme

g39 / warp