Disclosing signals for DECENNIUM

Clouded Border (Gorse Cone) | 2022-24 | Detail of vitrine

 

Clouded Border (Gorse Cone) | 2022-24
3m 23s of 16:9 digital video with sound, vitrine with monoprint on paper roll, photograph, laser-cut card maquette, cricket clicker, falconry whistle, upturned glass and ampoules of gorse scent

Looking back at DECENNIUM, Hestercombe Gallery's 10th Anniversary show. which was also Tim Martin's penultimate show as curator there. Megan Calver and I showed Clouded Border (Gorse Cone), a video work made at Durlston Country Park in 2022, alongside a new collection of objects accumulated over the previous year as we reflected on the legacy of the influential World War Two engineer and paranormal researcher Alec Harley Reeves.

The video records the intervention of a paper cone in the landscape that both amplified the interaction between gorse and wind, and drew the attention of passing bees. We were responding to the site’s history as a lookout and World War II signalling station. Traces of the wartime ground station with its large receiving dish have all but disappeared. The work reflects on the layers of history that lie over and under the site and discloses signals from the more-than-human that might pass beneath normal human perception.

DECENNIUM ran from 23rd March to 7th July 2024 at Hestercombe Gardens, Cheddon Fitzpaine, Taunton, Somerset TA2 8LG. It also included work by Tania Kovats, Helen Sear, Simon Faithfull, Alex Hartley, Mariele Neudecker, Philippa Lawrence, Sarah Bennett, Trish Morrissey, Susan Derges, John Newling, Feral Practice, Brendan Barry, Sophy Rickett, Liz Nicol, Jo Lathwood, Lucy Soni, Fiona Hingston, Simon Bayliss and Rebecca Partridge.