Empty Signs

Between Heaven & Earth

Between Heaven & Earth was an exhibition of my ongoing work 'The Eisegete's Cell' in my local parish church, St. Andrew's, Bolam. The purpose of the work was to stimulate thought and discussion during Lent about some of the difficult issues surrounding Bible translation and exegesis.

The works comprised three linked groups; a set of four 90x90cm paintings, small sculptures grouped around the Mediæval font, and an installation of books, prints, pins and thread on a table.

The paintings were on three Bible passages; the temptations of Jesus during his 40 days in the wilderness, Moses'40 days on Mt. Sinai and Israel's 40 years wandering, and Genesis XI:1-9, the story of Babel.

The Cartographer's Song

This sculpture is made from an altered illuminated globe, re-covered in latex-impregnated paper held together with string. On the latex is a sort of omnidirectional 'song' or concrete poem in which the Cartographer prays for mercy and peace. I completed this piece about two months ago while putting my paper portfolio together.

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This sketch is from a series of pieces I made about diagrams and reading. It's around 31 x 57cm, made using a mapping pen and goose quill. During my 12keys project of 2005, I became interested in different grammars of drawing, in how - if the weighting is wrong - the object of a labeled diagram can seem to be sprouting antennæ and feelers. How swashes and flourishes need to be 'read through' to make sense of a letter.

full stop.

This little strange piece I made for the MORTAL show but decided against exhibiting. It would have been eclipsed by 'the a game', sending out an even more confused message than that deliberately polyphonic, encyclopædic folly does on its own. The fragment of bone is from my mother's medical school skeleton. I don't know if it is still the case, but when my parents were at medical school in London each student had two skeletons; their own and another. All that remains of my mother's is a mess of bones in a white plastic bag, missing most parts but with some curious additions. How does one acquire a spare jaw?

If respect even comes into it, is using a part of some unknown body to make a work of trite art worse than leaving it in a bag? Somehow I couldn't bring myself to set scalpel to that fragment of spongy bone. Somehow I ended up shaping it with my teeth, picking at it with my nails as if it were part of my own body. How small a part of someone is taboo? Some cells are more sacred than others, even now. Eggs and seed. The chest was already broken, using it was a little step.

Carving Nature at the Joints

This letter is carved from the medial epicondyle of a lamb's humerus and is approximately 2.5 x 3 x 2 cm. It was carved using a grinding disk and drill. The varied colouring and texture results from the transition between compacted outer bone and the spongy inner bone found inside the epiphysis. The piece was partly inspired by my recent visit to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Some of the most fascinating and terrifying exhibits was an example of the severely "anaklosed" skeleton of a 30 year old man who suffered from an extremely rare genetic disorder now called fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. This disease causes muscles, tendons and ligaments to be gradually replaced with bone, imprisoning the sufferer within their own ossifying body. The bowed skeleton was like nothing I have ever seen, a cage of bone interlaced with baroque excrescences, the back an almost solid mass of arching bone. The body, like so many medical curiosities, was almost certainly taken from its grave and sold without the permission of the former owner or his relatives. What a profession, to search for the country for tales of people with rare conditions. Tracking down the bodies of rare mistakes to sell to interested gentlemen bent on acquiring the rarest specimens, pitting their prized collections against one another in the spirit of friendly scientific rivalry. The pieces, the collectors and their culture, all written in the same flawed shifting alphabet.

The Fall of Language

This is an ink and graphite drawing on reclaimed sunbleached card. The composition was influenced, Surrealist-style, by the characteristics of the surface. Hidden within the inked swirls are the letters of the Alphabet and the Arabic numerals. The pale tower has onehundred and fourtyfour layers of assymetric bricks, hand-drawn with technical pencil.