Inside Outside
Inside Outside: metaphysical spaces, in the natural environment and manmade. Internal and external spaces are experienced as one space.
Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to one and long for the other.
Space and Place, The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan
The nature of experience in the natural environment has been a factor of my work for many years, but having had a break in producing art for a few years I find that returning to my practice, the theme returns stronger than ever. My practice is about a discovery of motives, an encouragement to inspire dialogues and make work that is thought provoking, questioning and inviting intersubjective exchange with the viewer. An artists view encompassing the past, present and future in the landscape. The audience remains important to the reason for making the work.
Into The Hills (see exhibitions page for more detail) launched me back into creating new work for exhibition. Whatever preconceptions I had about how this work was going to be created, the room the work was to be placed in immediately forced its way onto my imagination . This led to wrapping the C 16th walls of the room with an ancient landscape of rock bearing the mysterious and beautiful marks of ageing millstone grit. Loosely based on rocks at a local beauty spot the result was a space as a theatre of rock formations, a stage for the presence of man in nature. I imagined the journey taken to reach this place; a tiring uphill struggle to a summit with grand views. Here the audience is invited to rest before passing on. A continuous passage of feet through the internal room of the summit, further wearing the stone down, each contributing in a miniscule way to the cycle of formation of rock on this planet. Time, change and scale acting silently with us as we pass.
'Into The Hills' is a set of large scale, immersive drawings executed in charcoal. The entire set was redisplayed at Keighley Creative Space 6 month later. Here freed from the C16th half timbered room the work took on another aspect, that of an illustrated rock space. The drawings seemed to grow with the space given them, and became statues or standing stones with presence. The details of the rock faces simple, minimal monoliths.
Into The Hills, Mill Bridge Gallery, Skipton, 2019
Field Day was a collaborative exhibition where the idea of the formal gallery space is disrupted by placing it with out walls in a field. (Grassington Festival, Ion Arts, 2009)
Field Day, Ion Arts, Grassington Festival 2009
A review of another immersive project produced for Fabric Bradford. I worked with a team of writers, actors and techs to realize this. A story and sound effects soundtrack was relayed to the audience through earphones as we walked through the history of Manningham 100 years ago. click the link for the Culture Vulture review:
Simon Cantrill plays artist William Rothschild