Measured In Shadows 1996-97
Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle and the Guinness Hopstore DublinMultimedia installation by Russell Mills and Ian Walton
Earth-clad hardback books, steel hanging grid, IBM 10.5” hard drive disc, Victorian family Bible, earth, 80 mixed media paintings and assemblages, random lighting system, six CD x twelve speaker aleotoric sound system, three VHS films on continual loop (birds: 1 minute 54 seconds; river: 3 minutes 24 seconds; smoke: 5 minutes 53 seconds)
Films by Russell Mills; edited by Russell Mills and Michael Webster
The Moment of Movement (The Morphology of the Amorphous)
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now *
The artist who perceives his art as conveying an idea of truth works from a position of paradox: for such art, if one is to understand it as a transforming of one material into another to bring ‘truth’ into being, is actually formed out of artifice. It is made with the implicit recognition of imitation or imperfection, it is made in one sense as the self-conscious revelation of the artist’s intervention into chaos to create order… image… object.
Measured in Shadows goes to the heart of these things both in what Mills and Walton have taken as their symbolic subject and in their mirroring in process of that subject. The installation is a celebration of the truth of man’s only constant, the natural world and its immutable cycles. It is also an affirmation of the conception of art as a symbolic language by which our understanding of the world and its infinite variety can be coherently expressed and communicated. Central to the installation and in each of the individual works is the parallel between a belief that nature ‘just is and just does’ and an artistic process of putting materials (paints, pigments, objects) into motion and flux, allowing chance and accident to become an integral part of process. The artist becomes, in a sense, a channel and it is in this and in the belief that such action provokes a kind of regeneration that Mills and Walton take their place in the artistic continuum of figures such as Schwitters, Beuys and Kiefer. Unafraid to place the frail, the unadorned before us as objects for contemplation such art provokes a particular and poignant recognition that consciousness though painful is necessary, the fulcrum from which to feel ‘the gestures of enabling…’
This work is not an expression of a nostalgic fondness for nature; it depicts the necessary but relentless indifference of the natural order whose death is inextricably bound with regeneration.
Science has become in a sense, the revelation of mystery in a way that art once was, exposing feats of natural adaptation and evolution, where nature works faster than man in restoring ecological balance or developing rationally impossible characteristics to survive the most hostile environments. Measured in Shadows offers up such discoveries as possible truths to affirm how little in fact we comprehend about our universe: even time as we have conceptualized it is called into question. It offers these evidences however as a celebration rather than a negation where the earth itself and the transformations nature demonstrates provide an order and resonance of immeasurably greater potential than history, science or art alone can provide. It places man not centrally, but as an integral part of the natural order: isolated, trapped even, but nonetheless elevated as the one animal able to comprehend its state and bound through consciousness to respond, record, connect, to create.
“So I began to get an idea of bog as the memory of the landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in it and to it…°
This is a shared vision of the place of art to provoke and reveal a consciousness that comes from examining these nebulous areas of change, these edges of shadows where man’s intellectual knowledge coincides with natural wisdom. As a whole the installation echoes the Wordsworthian imperative that art should disclose in the workings of the universe analogues for the workings of the human mind and soul. More specifically in the individual paintings Mills and Walton mirror natural processes allowing materials to be true to their natures, staining, evaporating, collaging, excavating, veiling, which both describe and embody their subject. These works require time and quiet contemplation for their multi-layered meanings fully to resonate. The installation derives its name from the evidence that classical Greek architecture originated in the sun, that the architects knew how to measure geometrically by raising a column and tracing an initial north-south axis marked by the shortest shadow cast by the sun’s zenith. It is this meeting of the rational and the natural, the known and the instinctive which permeates and is given voice in the work.
… it is a flow, which has form, a form which flows… at the still point of the turning world, neither arrest nor development. Form in stone, cloud, poem, in man. †
It seems that man in an atavistic search to understand the nature of what he is, moves inextricably from relationship with the very forces that shape his being. In our longing to assuage a sense of powerlessness at the relentless and undeniable truth of the continuum, we arrive at what end? Perhaps only to discover from all our searchings the actuality of mystery, the certainty that nothing is certain.
© Emma Hill, Director of the Eagle Gallery London, edited from the original 1996 Measured in Shadows catalogue essay.