Dispossessions
Ivor Barnard
| Opens on Oct 4 until Oct 26 |
Dispossessions uses the languages of mapping and surveying to objectify landscapes, intentionally distancing the viewer from any intimate engagement with the very landscapes such languages lay claim to representing.
My recent sculptures (eg Ghost 2023, Entitlement 2024) have explored both my personal relationship to landscape, as well as our culture’s changing relationship. The works acknowledge discovery, mapping, colonization & commodification, as well as the loss and disempowerment of the people who live in these landscapes. They also attempt to problematise the supposed neutrality of modes of visual representation of landscape topography.
Co-opting mapping and surveying technologies has helped me amplify tensions that I believe are inherent to landscape representation: On the one hand these technologies have an extraordinary ability to visually describe three-dimensional topography on a two-dimensional surface, however they simultaneously manage to distance the viewer from any intimate engagement with the very landscapes they claim to represent.
Although they go about it in very different ways, the two sculptures in Dispossessions both explore my personal relationship with space and place through the representation of landscape. One of the works, using the language of terrain mapping, seems to descend from above, imposing a rational structure upon the formless space beneath. The other work explores a dialectical understanding of the ever-unfolding relations between a whole (landscape) and its parts. Analysis & synthesis operate simultaneously, across time, embodying the adage that ‘change is the only constant’.
Co-opting mapping and surveying technologies has helped me amplify tensions that I believe are inherent to landscape representation: On the one hand these technologies have an extraordinary ability to visually describe three-dimensional topography on a two-dimensional surface, however they simultaneously manage to distance the viewer from any intimate engagement with the very landscapes they claim to represent.
Although they go about it in very different ways, the two sculptures in Dispossessions both explore my personal relationship with space and place through the representation of landscape. One of the works, using the language of terrain mapping, seems to descend from above, imposing a rational structure upon the formless space beneath. The other work explores a dialectical understanding of the ever-unfolding relations between a whole (landscape) and its parts. Analysis & synthesis operate simultaneously, across time, embodying the adage that ‘change is the only constant’.
ivor.barnard.sculpture
