Objects of Uncertain Origin

Objects of Uncertain Origin is a series begun in 2018 whilst working in the artist residency studio at the Winsor & Newton Research Laboratory in London. Inspired in part by the archive of undocumented artifacts held by Winsor & Newton Labs. Each wood panel is 30x30cm, there are currently perhaps 16 completed panels with ideas to refine and continue.

The inspiration for this series is the Russian Sci-Fi novel Roadside Picnic. In it, humans are obsessed with the debris left behind by a visiting alien race. Objects we have no understanding of because they don’t follow even our most basic physical laws. Their location seems to be contaminated by unknown forces, in an area cordoned off so that only scientists, government agents or stalkers risk accessing the zone.

Roadside Picnic was written in the 1970s during the cold war but what is fascinating about reading it today is that it makes more sense of the present, the objects that we have around us are increasingly alien to us, even their manufacturers are not able to fully understand them as their component parts come from multiple sources that protect their uniqueness while the object as a whole is designed with built-in obsolescence.

I am drawn to the unknown and to glitches in the system; this series of painted panels is a library of forms; an archive of uncertain objects. Things; seen, found, remembered, read or imagined. Selecting from the everyday glitches in the fabric of life, these objects range from structures in farm fields to interstellar asteroids, from components of larger structures to tracking devices embedded in human bodies. They are both visible and invisible, broken, discarded, fragmentary, forgotten or perhaps even hidden so that we no longer notice they are there, much less question why or how they are there or what they are doing.

They are perhaps a kind of psychological prop - both a process to redirect my own compulsions to collect and store information toward what I am making and as a safeguard against fear. When things get too fragile or up in the air, they are grounded in reality. They offer tangible experiments with the physical material of matter and provide a focus toward which I can redirect the compulsion to research, collect and collate information. They offer an outlet to create order, a crazy fictional order it might be but it is an order. 

I am interested in knowledge as a concept and as a political strategy. We are at a pivotal moment in human evolution; knowledge is a primary value yet the exponential growth of its volume is now beyond human understanding or means of access, we can no longer make sense of the vast quantities of information or data, for that we need machines. The objects that make up our world are increasingly alien to us. We no longer know how things are made or what the component materials are that constitute them. Our relationship to things is changing, sophisticated processes lock us out, so that they are no longer part of our knowledge. Objects are hard to read just by looking or touching or even using, therefore, the majority of our world is becoming illegible. Drawing on what we already know limits what things might become, it is for this reason that I am drawn to objects that I don't understand.

Working in squares mirrors the accidental structure of our screen-based world. The structure is limited and patched together, a hexagon would have been better but this form of failure is something we carry forward because it's too difficult to go back and start again.