introduction

A wake is a symptom of an intimate process of friction between space, time and a physical body, a material conscience of a journey passed. The word ‘wake’ comes from the ancient Indo-European root ‘wog’ or ‘weg’, meaning ‘to be active’, and is taken in the form of a burial as a sense of actively watching or guarding.

In its wake presents a group of artists whose works are activated by a subjective deliberation or reverie of hand, mind and material, and which are imbued with an inherent physicality bearing witness to their becoming. While it is often stated that in many acts of image making, one has to be blind to either the actual model (world) or the drawing (ideal model), these works explore internal worlds that one sees with and through actively, blending figure and ground, becoming, being and passing, and therefore while being records of a process are in themselves imbued with a latent energy that actively continues to resonate. As transmitters (or perhaps vessels of exchange) of the intimate relationship between maker and made, the works may provide the possibility of stimulating in the viewer a physical motor-neurone response to the man-made that is both empathetic and provocative.

If the origin of art is at the service of some ritual, be it magical or religious, it appears that in many instances the current ritual is in the service of instantaneous consumption and satisfaction. It is timely then that these artists’ works provide not an objective immediate satisfaction but exhibit subjective and often ritualistic acts of creation/manipulation/transmutation that must be actively lived-in by viewer as they were lived-through by maker. All contain a sense of their own history, the history of human notational systems, as a fundamental part of their making; marks made by a physical body, onto a physical body. An element of friction, of dragging, both of material and of time lingers in their presence with the aim that immediacy of consumption is momentarily suspended in favor of an experience of time, duration, and physicality on the intimate scale of physical, actual, human relations.

The works are the testimony to a process, a grace of conscience, on which time has left its trace. They are not facsimiles, avatars or simulacra, but wakes.