Panoramic Decelerator was a solo show for Jim Hobbs. Greenwich University commissioned me to write an essay and design a format for the writing to accompany the exhibition. As a friend, it was a pleasure to write an intimate text about melancholy to reflect his work.
Extract:
"It is seven years since he and I were in Port Townsend, Washington together. “City of Dreams”, New Year, holed up with fellow artists in the warm heart of an American forest. It may be seven years to the day since we both got up before dawn, as we both still do today – now to walk dogs, then to make work. As I willed the sun to rise through a dawn vigil, he watched smoke rise, billow and break – smoke caused by paper-making; the smoke and mirrors of the creation of the tabula rasa. I was trying to forge the gold; he was watching its apparition sublimate and dissipate before his eyes.
...
"Morning and mourning. Separated thinly by that ‘U’, the ‘U’ in ‘cruche’ that Ponge depicts, that makes the vessel what it is – “more hollow than hollowness… a hollow surrounded by a fragile earth; rough and easily cracked”. The morning horizon becomes the ultimate hollow through its missing you. You that is me, reflected back into the void as the sun fails to strike through the saturated skies.
...
"The harshness of detail, of memory, is lost, burnt in and fogged over. Undefinable, a landscape becomes the landscape, the earth, resting on shifting ground. Landscape made by suns, winds, tectonic plates. Wars, fag butts and whiskey bottles. Beetles, and rabbits with mexamytosis. Everyday, and yet a mythic other. M-other (earth)."
The full text is available on my website as below, as well as other commissioned writings under the section 'Other projects'.