Art History – can you draw me a diagram opens on Saturday 16th at 7pm at Haarlem Artspace in Wirksworth. It’s a show I’ve Curated with David Gilbert using all the artworks I still have in my studio. I’ve also made some prints to accompany the show that are for sale with 50% of sales going to support Haarlem Artspace. See in the shop for more info.
As I emptied my space of the last 12 years of work it was nice to see old work anew, remember people I’ve worked with and places I’ve explored. It was difficult too, seeing the same ideas worked and reworked with no concrete solution found! David and I have written this to accompany the work
Art History: Do you want me to draw you a diagram?
Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains in intact. Georges André Malraux
There is always a temptation to try to come up with a Universal Theory of Everything, to understand or make sense of what we are doing and making. This has been at the core of the work David and Kate have undertaken in relation to Kate’s practice and its outcomes. Since 2008 they have come together repeatedly to look at Kate’s work and have often used diagrams by leading cultural theorists to think with and describe its repeated re-iterations. But all these diagrams, and Kate and David’s, have proven to be inadequate. All are – inevitably – provisional responses.
This collaboration has seen them looking back over Kate’s archive of work and considering its current concerns against those of 2008, which placed Kate and her work in the Wider World. In response, they have generated this show and a new diagram which attempts to redefine the relationship between Kate, the work and the Wider World. The layering of the work on the walls and tables is deliberately archaeological and is a direct attempt to visually undermine a linear historical narrative. It creates physical and temporal overlaps and allows unexpected glimpses of works in each other.