Output details

'Work in the Dark', Large ceramic installation commissioned for the Busan Biennale, South Korea, 2012

Commissioned by Manifesta 9 because of my research and work in relation to immaterial/material labour and installations located in post-industrial sites. This large-scale artwork focuses upon gaps left in the speedy move from Industrial to post-industrial production. The artwork takes as its starting point the site itself, the grand, above-ground public part of a large disused coal mine. The area is designed to encourage a sense of the valour and value of the labour beneath the surface, in stark contrast to the difficult working circumstances.

The installation appropriated and manipulated the public face of work, examining the relationship between the visual identity of work and what might be called the dirty or material end of work. The distinction being made here is between work as an idea, as a projection, and work as a material activity. Making the artwork also questioned our relationship to objects and the material nature of work in a period that is marked by immaterial labour and an absorption in two dimensional and virtual space.

Several site visits were made and the history and current visual state of the site were researched, recorded and referenced along with local crafts and vernacular early modern motifs. I interrogated floor/building plans, magazines, posters, and the sites architectural features in the course of developing the project.

The artwork posed as a kind of machine, taking the form of a number of hanging hand-marbled wooden beams and a series of posters with short texts, part instruction and part conversation/script, in which a character articulates their ineffective or value-less role in a seemingly intangible form of production. Here the worker/viewer/artist are understood to be interchangeable subjects, and the notion of a contemporary form of viewing or spectatorship is, especially in a climate of ‘user-lead content’, visually and physically critiqued.