For the most part, we regard ourselves as separate, distinct beings, perhaps not subject to the laws of nature. The buildings we design and construct – hermetically sealed, climate-controlled, and energetically inefficient – reflect and reinforce this view.
But it’s lonely there, disconnected from our surroundings and fellow beings, and it’s not working out very well.
The surfaces, volumes and views I have assembled here propose an alternative as much to the built environment as to the insulated selves we construct. Here we encounter insubstantial boundaries, temporary arrangements and simple materials which contain space only as much as they invite passage. Among them perhaps we can forget our alienation and re-establish a relationship with our surroundings.
This body of work relates to my ongoing concern with climate change, something I occasionally explore on Penumbra. Ashraf Jamal wrote very eloquently, and flatteringly, about that in his book In the World.
Photographs by Matt Slater, courtesy of WhatiftheWorld.
Installation view, 2023
Canopy, 2023, Kraft paper, hardware, dimensions variable
Canopy comprises a large, folded paper roof-like structure assembled into a hyperbolic parabola. The light, efficient construction suggests something which is transient and responsive to its environment.
Corner 1, 2023, weathering steel, 105 x 105 x 5cm
Corner 1, the first of three such works, describes the corner of a room with its interleaved members and the passages between them. Its rusted surface too suggests responsiveness to its conditions.
Corner 1 (detail), 2023, weathering steel
Corner 2, 2023, weathering steel, 105 x 105 x 5cm
Like the previous work, Corner 2 also describes the corner of a room, this time an external corner.
Corner 3, 2023, weathering steel, 105 x 105 x 5cm
The third in this suite of works addresses the relationship between wall and floor in the same way the other two treated the meeting of walls at a corner.
Corner 3 (detail), 2023, weathering steel
Membrane, 2023, Tulipwood, 188 x 123 x 47cm
This large wooden structure – shifting and changing at every view – functions as a barrier only as much as it invites passage through its complex construction.
Membrane, 2023, Tulipwood
Membrane (detail), 2023, Tulipwood
You are a sensitive membrane through which the world experiences itself, 2023, charcoal on wall
This large drawing, made with a builder’s chalk line saturated in charcoal, comprises lines converging at around eye level. Such lines are typical conventions used to depict perspective, but here they also converge right on the viewer, collapsing the distance between there and the horizon. The title of this work is drawn from the work of cultural ecologist David Abram. His bridging of the philosophy of Phenomenology with ecological concerns had been central to me in the making of my 2013 show ‘Season’.
You are a sensitive membrane through which the world experiences itself (detail), 2023, charcoal on wall, dimensions variable
Paul Edmunds 