mark
3 screen video installation | silent | 2023
For this 3 channel installation I researched the deep history of representation and the first deliberate marks made by humans. The oldest, recorded, deliberate mark made by a human for its own sake was a zigzag etched into a mussel shell found at a dig in Trinil, eastern Java, (dated to between 540,000 and 430,000 years old). By comparison, the famous cave paintings of Spain and France are 20-30000 years old. I centred on mark making as the central motif because it is of deep significance to the history of both art and symbolic language. Over the course of the Templeton project - for which this exhibition was a celebration, I considered and discussed ritual as a means of negotiating the unknown. As attempts at meaning making, language and art provided means to create exograms – external renderings of that which is otherwise internal, navigating and delineating the division between the known and the unknown. In my work, mark, I used digital distortion techniques and fragmentation to evoke the emergence of language and representation out of the noise of a pre-linguistic state.
For this 3 channel installation I researched the deep history of representation and the first deliberate marks made by humans. The oldest, recorded, deliberate mark made by a human for its own sake was a zigzag etched into a mussel shell found at a dig in Trinil, eastern Java, (dated to between 540,000 and 430,000 years old). By comparison, the famous cave paintings of Spain and France are 20-30000 years old. I centred on mark making as the central motif because it is of deep significance to the history of both art and symbolic language. Over the course of the Templeton project - for which this exhibition was a celebration, I considered and discussed ritual as a means of negotiating the unknown. As attempts at meaning making, language and art provided means to create exograms – external renderings of that which is otherwise internal, navigating and delineating the division between the known and the unknown. In my work, mark, I used digital distortion techniques and fragmentation to evoke the emergence of language and representation out of the noise of a pre-linguistic state.
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