My selected work exhibited as part of FRESH 2017
Saturday 23 September 2017
Saturday 15 July 2017
A History of Touch solo exhibition
Mark
Mcleish
A
History of Touch
This body of work assembles a collection of new object
based installation and sculpture that questions the presumptuous act of knowing
through internalisation. By placing objects to be seen I proscribe to aggravate
logic in the reading and propose equalised values of just how do we generate
meaning?
By reducing thinking to be stabilised in a physical space
with objects, I compress intersubjectivity by initiating a version of
completeness. This is preserved by separation within exit points of making.
What do these objects continue to mean? This is a question I will never stop
asking as this is when a transference takes place.
This exhibition formalises a metaphysical approach by
turning objects into thought and vice-versa. A confession of experience retold
in a broken miss-spelt anthology of objects.
Abbi Turner: assistant curator and studio assistant
Friday 23 June 2017
Friday 31 March 2017
Inherited Absents
Working with ceramics for over ten years has allowed me to
develop a language that I consider is preserved in the layering of the making
process. I work a lot of the time with repetition and the direct involvement of
creating my amassments becomes an important translation to the work. I capture
traces of making in the work that purposefully locks in a separation from my
body through fingerprints and choreographed actions of movement. This in turn
gives the objects I make an inherited yearning to the body both by distant
trace and the behaviour of the symbolism presented.
Inherited
Absents (2016-17) is a piece that presents a collection of
numbered hand built porcelain wishbones. Each completely different and document
the change in making from different sittings of creation. I intend this body of
work to be ongoing and constantly renewed with the idealised destiny that each
wishbone is activated between two people. Dipped in wax offers both a visual
reading of the work to be more tactile, and in touch to offer a temporary feel
of comfort and safety. Presented in a vintage free standing bird cage to condition
the experience of looking at something kept and to be communicated with through
bars of proscribed habitat. Ideas for the work extrapolate from commentary on the
propaganda of climate change and how this has become a house hold terminology
that is controlled by the edited agendas of the leaders of the world. I want
the work to offer a very human centred involvement, a vehicle of connection and
a talisman for a meaningful wish.
Sunday 26 February 2017
Collisions in silence: breaking habits through making
I have cultivated a practice
that survives by direction best described as Artist as Collector. My inventory
of found objects amass no limitations or hierarchies and grow with nuance’s
that most of the time go unnoticed. The physical act of finding has an
important marriage to realisations of circumstances. This is shown and effected
by me as the finder and the complexities of being human in the mundanity of
living manifesting in results of acquisitions, jewelled with geography; where I
am at a given moment and what is the offering to harvest.
The stuff I collect comes from
many evolved sources, some are free and been crowned as junk or something lost,
abandoned or left behind (think of the glut of broken umbrellas with a stern
wind). Some are acquired by paying for them, favourite haunts are car-boot
sales and second hand shops. This has been inbuilt into my behaviour since
being a child, being given a few coins to hunt out my chosen finds at low financial
cost. I have even been a speaker and independently published zines for hints and
tips of making the most out of finding at these opportunities. I relish the
rush of looking to find something often I never knew I needed, I live and feed
this compulsion as a means to make my work.
Having stuff as ingredients
and materials to work with is a habit to which has formed over the years. I
think each readymade is enchanted with its own charge through unique memories
that overpower the realisation of the object and its visual reading. This can
obviously change simply by something as slight as changing the context to which
an existing object is viewed. A myriad of systems and a margin-less ethos to
making, results with my finds becoming something other than a prophesy as a sum
mirrored by each items provenance. A new language is created through a conglomerate
of ideas and working methodologies given rest bite through a constant making or
remaking. Gemstones get glued to cardboard then folded and hammered, signed
photographs reduced to confetti and contained, plastic flowers taken out of
graveyard bins are fabricated with heirlooms dipped in paint. My work long
ditched gravities to make things that are instantly attractive by means of conventional
decorative or ornamental viewpoints. This becomes humorous if you think of
majority of the original states of the objects I alter are knick-knacks or
souvenirs bearing witness to events, or simulating prescribed visual niceness
to put on display.
I see my work as an anthology
of objects echoing notions of still lives and self-portraits in isolated artefacts
that awaken miscellaneous withdrawals. Recovering something familiar that
adopts an attitude to yearnings of incompletion and intimacy of touch is an
absence I abruptly leave in my work, for space for personal prediction to fill.
Moons, Masks
Moons
Masks
Paper, aluminium, shoe laces
2016-17
That feeling when you need to stop ignoring something,
confront it, and let it go. To translate crudely Kill it to change its current form. I started with the physicality
of using my body and having a death mask taken. The endurance of this procedure
seemed to fit more than initially planned. The time under the cast, in the
cold, the dark and the silence with myself gave me the opportunity to re-prepare
for welcoming the light (having the cast removed). This was a considered preparation
and the death mask itself a totem of a remedy distilled in a moment of my own
face. Importance now lied in what do I do with its potency of the object? Dilute
it!
I took casts of the cast each taking part of the rooted purpose
with it. An involvement of making that made my hands draw the contours and
voids of my face over and over again to reveal a new offering of a simple mask
that will restrict the living acts of the face if worn.
In plain sight I couldn’t recognise myself, I saw my
deceased Farther. Something distant that sits in my blood has been surfaced in
this work.
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