16 January 2010
The early bird catches the worm
It’s a dog eat dog world
There are plenty more fish in the sea
It is not a new idea that we humans are not so different from the rest of the animal kingdom. Instinct can be described as behaving spontaneously, reacting in an animalistic way, not by learned behaviour or based on experience but by intuition. When are the moments when we feel most instinctual? What is it to be human or animal and what is the relationship between us? We live in tandem with animals; in fact, our genetic make-up can be extremely similar, yet as people, we consider ourselves the dominant species. We ultimately govern the planet and yet we, the more ‘intelligent’ species, are in many ways actually destroying it.
From this huge topic, selected artists pose questions and comment on the ‘animalistic’ side of human nature; which varies from the humorous to the macabre, from the confessional to the symbolic and representational. The artists have been selected because these questions are already festering within their respective artistic practices, and are being grappled with through a range of media and visual languages.
Selected Works from Instinct, curated by artists Victoria Lucas and Claire Blundell-Jones.
Claire Blundell-Jones, I’m just a shell of my former self” 2009. Installation – vinyl lettering
This anthropomorphic pun highlights the continuing changes and history of the shop and building, and the impact of recession. We use animal characteristics frequently in language and everyday exchanges. The vinyl lettering, conventionally used as an advertising tool in shop windows, is an enlarged replication of my handwriting. This adds a subjective human touch to the commercial tool.
Andy Broadey, Carousel 2010. Installation using Slide Projections
Like many other families, my parents have accumulated a large collection of photographs. Their archive documents various events in the development of my family - my parents’ marriage, my sister’s birth and then my own, assorted Christmas festivities, package holidays to Corfu and Benidorm. The collection also plots a history of photographic technology: over time, it shifts from photographic slides to 6x4 paper prints, and subsequently to digital files. Carousel, my contribution to the Instinct exhibition, focuses upon the period documented by slides. My parents stopped making slides in 1982, yet the events documented here continue to be relevant to how we negotiate relationships within our family. As the events become increasingly remote, our memories of them blur, and the way they are framed by the camera becomes an increasingly important memory aid. As a result, our memories of particular formative experiences become ever more dependent upon 35mm slide projection -a technology that is increasingly seen as outdated, disconnected with contemporary life, obsolete, a relic.
Carousel emphasizes this contradiction. It consists of five plinths, five carousel projectors, and one hundred and forty five slides from my parents’ photo collection. The projections form an overlapping series of images, each asserting their unitary structure whilst simultaneously overlaying and merging into one another, emphasizing their contribution towards the wider family history. Each series is made from five slides taken from a particular slide film and focuses upon a particular event. After four seconds the slide changes on each projector, creating a new sequence of images. The slides comprise forty-two years of archive material; with eighty spaces in each carousel, there are twenty-eight series of five images each, and the remaining spaces have been left blank, indicating the end of the slide archive. The sequence begins with my parents’ wedding in 1968 and ends with a family holiday in Corfu in 1982, continually circulating for the duration of the exhibition.
Andy would like to thank Keith Broadey, Margaret Broadey, Valerie O'Riordan, and Pete Morton for their help in realizing this project.
Exhibition Overview
Other exhibiting artists in this show included:
Hondartza Fraga
Steve Humble
Jon Procter
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