Output details

"Back to the Things Themselves" - individual contribution to a two person exhibition that took place as part of the as part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, 20th April – 7th May 2012.

This output comprised a two person exhibition (with artist Lesley Punton) at the Briggait Galleries as part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (GI) 2012, selected by Katrina Brown of the Common Guild and GI Director 2010 & 2012.

The two artists in this exhibition share a fascination with the problems of articulating lived experience within natural settings of very different kinds. Spark’s contribution was produced in parallel with Output 1 and shares its concerns relating to the confounding of the natural with the technological; this time by the construction of an experience that confirms the independence between these two realms.

For example, the graphite drawings presented force an association between the complexity of natural forms in nature and the paraphernalia of daily life that we rely upon but do not understand, showing these two realms as interdependent, intertwined and unfixed. The ‘technologies’ of FM radio and of drawing employed in the work are applied meditatively and a form of feedback loop is created between the natural and mediated sounds, and between the drawings and the broadcast speech that are their reflection. Further details of the work are contained in the accompanying PowerPoint presentation.

The exhibition was featured on the Glasgow International website and Punton and Spark were interviewed by the curator Magdalen Chua for DAILYSERVING an international online publication for contemporary art. As a direct result of the show, Spark was asked to take part in Picture Window, part of the international Sonica sound festival (Glasgow 2012). A further development from this Output is that a discussion has begun between the author and the artist / writer Sam Clarke (UWS) on their approaches to visual and written practice. The product of this exchange has been provisionally accepted by the EcoArtScotLand website http://ecoartscotland.net/ for publication later this year.