Internal Tourist

Kiln update: the first batch of molds were removed yesterday, the old ashes tipped out, my new dry(ish) sawdust added with two more molds, and the old ashes put on top. The fire re-lit from these smoldering remains and burnt well, so I'd say the fire never went out! With the dry(ish) sawdust it's going much better, and at my count has reached its 77th hour tonight at 9pm! Also: today we had another aluminium pour, in which I assisted by feeding the big crucible with metal and skimming the slag off the surface; my first attempt at a stand got a bit of an overhaul. Now it is three-legged and appears more graceful (and stable).

After much deliberation, of writing and rearranging various words on bits of masking tape, my exhibition title has been decided: Internal Tourist (http://leftbankgallery.wordpress.com/). But why this name for a small group of elevated, baked horse dung shapes? I wanted Internal to refer to something architectural and also bodily. My shapes appear like dislocated junctions between arterial routes; tunnels cleaving into or away from one another, bifurcating, or passing in close proximity. Therefore I want to relate the process I have gone through, of mixing and reworking a material that has already been processed by digestive tract, to present a sense of interiority.

John Greenwood’s cover artwork for Orbital’s 1996 LP In Sides (see below) springs to mind when thinking of mysterious and somewhat fictitious internal bodily shapes. Because these organs operate silently within us, we must trust the surgeon and the biologist to provide us with tangible forms, interior made exterior. My objects seem to be somewhere between bodily organs and ceramic vessels.

The Tourist part is because there is so much of this activity around us, on road signs, in pamphlets, on holiday adverts. We are advised where to stand to take photographs, where to drive to follow a castle trail, or where to imbue foodstuffs made locally. I am a tourist here too, but not a very good one, having spent most of my time in this intensely historic area hidden in the studio applying manure to cardboard. The idea of tourism as a sanctioned leisure activity clashes with the concept of Urban Exploration, whereby individuals choose to venture into abandoned sites, indeed some of them old leisure attractions. The difference is that there is no tour guide, you are there on your own wits, and you have the opportunity of documenting and presenting a history of a place that may otherwise be forgotten (see: http://www.simoncornwell.com/urbex/).

For example, Todstone - a disused farmhouse a little further up the hill from the Clova Estate and from another disused row of houses called Old Town. This area was the the original location of Lumsden.

Returning to the work, because the objects will be displayed on very high stands (or perhaps very low in some cases), there will be an intentional difficulty in finding a good viewpoint – the onlooker will have to stand awkwardly to try to focus inside the shapes. Therefore, my inspiration of unseen or unknowable places such as the stone cities of Cappadocia, or the Glasgow Botanic Underground will, I hope, have been replicated in my own particular way for this residency.