TEXT A has been written by Alexa Kusber, a curator based in London who has developed exhibitions such as The Museum of Everything, Wasted at the V&A, Soundlife London and Warholesque. Recently Alexa had developed a cultural project for Ralph Lauren, a sound series for GALERIE8 and is currently working on developing film programs.



i see a stark room welcomed by a huge carpet of what looks like metallic cotton scrapings that give the impression of being sharp and cozy at the same instant. the rug is in the shape of a rectangle measuring around 6 by 8 feet and is centered in the middle of the room. it shines and flickers from the light of an opaque window situated in the front of the room hitting the popcorn-like aluminium material, reflecting yet also absorbing the light. from this radiance noise like in analog video and television appears…. those random dot patterns of static displayed when no transmission signal is obtained by a receiver. text flys above me, circling the room with words and numeric years adding a silver lining of imprints to consider. one word or short phrases such as a girl’s name, a city, a happening, a school, a scientific term, a book… all attached to a year in time.

the artist investigates the possibilities of creating a connection of art, language and space. the rug of aluminium echoes the aesthetic language of minimalism while simultaneously fluctuating between pure language and personal memory.

reflections, influences, moments, impacts, grounding yet always in flight.

Artist and lecturer Robert Fearns has written TEXT B. Represented by Room Art Space, Fearns work explores 'cinematic memory' through drawing, video and mixed media.



You go to another country and the light switch lets you know you are somewhere else. It’s no longer a square of white plastic with a rocker switch in the middle, down for on, up for off. In the USA it’s a vertical rectangle with a flick switch, up for on, down for off, and you think ‘why do they have to do it different’. In France it’s round and old fashioned, the sort of switch that usually means the wiring is out of date and dangerous, and you think ‘It’s France and this is all part of the charm’, and it’s not where you expect it to be - just inside the door at a height you instinctively reach for – it’s in the middle of the wall or cut into the door frame. And you realise how unaware you’ve been of the light switches at home, how you use them every day but never notice them, how you don’t think they mean anything but in fact they do. They mean you are in a controlled environment. Functioning, safe, standardised, anonymous. And this image is of just such a standard light switch. But it’s not on a wall. Is it somehow floating in space? There’s a reflection of its edge on the black background, reflected on what? The switch is down so the light is on. On the plastic switch plate there’s a shadow of the switch itself, perhaps cast by the light it controls. And the image is grainy, and seen at a slight angle, like a film still. And half the image is black. A dense black void. This is not an image of a light switch. It’s a before and after moment. I can hear sounds in the background. I can feel the off screen space. It’s an image of what I can’t see.

Lance Boreham, writer and performer has composed TEXT C. Boreham has investigated the use of propagana in the press and is a regular guest on the local radio station, London Fields Radio.



Impressionistic, polarized, dream-like, doll-like, fragile, vegetables, cherries, death, stasis, sacrifice.

Form: impressionistic, vivid, spherical. Colour palette: earthy, dream-like, unreal. Signifiers: sharply defined image isolated in imaginary space. Background: Abstract, complimentary.

Content: Piece functions through inconsistency. All traditional aspects of the work are lampooned through the employment of discontinuity. For instance the colour palette and signifiers each find their opposite within the piece.

Signifiers (3) add up to a triangle (isosceles). these triangular focal points begin from the northern most point then clockwise down through the other two points. To follow the triangle one gets the thought combination: porcelain cake/ polar barbie/ siren madonna. The total communicates: Softness, weakness, ugliness. All 3 signifiers are depicted negatively and unrealistically. The signifiers are closely related and bring about the considerations: power/subjugation, masculine/feminine, X and its opposite.

Reading: Impression of liquidity, death, and cakes. Signifiers are a unified mass composed of a denser, more articulate combination of the base elements of the composition.

Stylistically the picture almost splits in two, drifting from the sharply defined upper 50% into the painterly bottom 50%. The result is the impression that the triangulated signifiers are rooted, from the bottom, off-the-page, and elsewhere. The logical interpretation of this is that of communicating isolation and stasis.

A final reading unearths an American euphemism pertaining to the female breasts, which owing to the static and fragile quality of the image can be understood as an anti-patriarchal reflex or pro-feminist comment.

TEXT D has been written by Adam Burton, a print and text based artist from London. Burton is a co-director of artist run space, Vulpes Vulpes in Clapton.



All to see is the letter G.
Some more and to see the beaks of some birds.
Some people stand at the bar and a wine glass.
Most reaction is not determined by what to see.

If it is all possible a tell.
From a angle a brown could be a desert floor.
A monochrome could be that prison camp.
These blacks are smeared charcoal into dirt.

If all supermarket floors.
Cut off sucked into coshmoss.
On the right.
On the left looking down from a right rise.

Some bats washed up on shore with a beaks.
To suppose it muybe a beatch.
Victims of natural disasters.
Are not naturally victims.

And finally there is some pink.
Lilac and crabstick poled into space.
Smoking.
As ey near eir target.

TEXT E by Pierre d'Alancaisez who founded Waterside Contemporary in 2008, a gallery committed to developing an ambitious and vibrant multidisciplinary and cross-generational program.



‘You bastard! You ate the last of my crackers.’

In the 1990s, artist Keith Arnatt collected notes and messages left for him by his wife Jo. Reproduced in his photographs, communiques like ‘where are my Wellingtons, you stupid fart?’ paint a trivial daily existence filled with feeding cats and reheating ready-meals. Not quite the lifestyle one would expect of the self-proclaimed ‘real artist’.

The post-it note is by design disposable. Its size limits the word count, and its fluorescent yellow takes over the message within it. It is perhaps because of these reducing qualities that Elliott, the supposed author of the message presented in the work, has chosen this medium to mark his departure. In pencil cursive, Elliott apologises and asks for god’s mercy, indicating that his next action may be somewhat more poignant than going out to pick up the dry cleaning.


The post-it note has been a long-time favourite for text art. Concise, iconic, direct and immediately intelligible, the pre-gummed square of paper lends itself to one-liners of all sorts. From Jo Arnatt’s laundry to Elliott’s suicide, 3M provide an appropriate carrier.

Elliott doesn’t go into detail. His considerable plan doesn’t ask for any special attention, instead satisfying itself with the emboldment granted to the yellow container. It is in keeping with the contents of the text, for Elliott is no longer here, and the trace he’s left is of no significance; it only matters that he did leave a trace at all. His last words are on recorded as slight an fleeting, but he has made an attempt to speak. The mercy he asked was automatically granted, and Elliott won’t stick around to see if this situation lasts.


I have considerable difficulty in treating Elliott’s message as anything other than a joke; its SMS-like format robs it of sincerity. I don’t imagine that the message is intended for me, and don’t want to gratify the author by encouraging thirty-two-character grunts as a viable means of communicating. Listen, if things are this bad, sit down, I’ll make some tea, and you can tell me all about it, right?

TEXT F by Amy Danbrowsky, a copy writer and editor, journalist and creative writer based in Berkshire. She earned her degree from The University of Reading and continued her studies at Brighton Journalist Works. Since 2008 she has contributed to local and national print and online media and is currently working in communications for a prominent Further Education college in Henley-on-Thames.



One person’s trash is another person’s treasure; the creation of new from old; a stark, harsh, intimidating landscape, created with such ingenuity and skill – this piece both intrigues and confuses me.

It’s bleak, mechanical, industrial and extreme. It’s also skilfully designed, thoughtfully crafted and intricately pieced together.

There’s nothing natural about the piece, yet it conveys the balance between life and death – nature in its rawest form. It’s a machine, seemingly pieced together with things once loved and treasured, discarded then salvaged, transformed then pieced together to create something with the sole intention of creation. But what does it create? If anything at all...

I feel forlorn just looking at it. I’m filled with sadness; like something somewhere along the line has been abused - its potential wasted. Yet I’m reassured knowing it’s been rejuvenated – each piece given its last swan song. It provokes subtle hints of Darwinism – evolution and the survival of the fittest. Whatever the separate pieces previously composed, they’ve survived in some form and been recreated to spectacularly imposing effect.

Still, the gloom remains. A machine stands in solitude with its muted colours, raw material, sharp corners and spiked drum. It stands against a stark white background, untainted, in its truest form. The machine looks dangerous and aggressive, yet precise and meticulously constructed. The image is simply staged and directed, yet great time and skill has been placed in the machine’s construction.

The structure’s defined by its symmetrical metal angles, precise frames, nuts, bolts and pipes. Each piece of metal’s stripped down to its original form, with areas of rusty blue, black and red paintwork remaining.

As a people, it’s often second-nature to admire architecture and design - something built for purpose and beautifully constructed. This piece, however intricately devised or crafted, has no such quality. It’s striking, but by no stretch of the imagination, beautiful. No matter the importance of a machine to industry, or a country’s reliance on such, it will never be as awe-inspiring as an architect’s palace or as stunning as nature’s canvas.

Increasingly, the image stirs up feelings of facade. I see a machine stripped bare but presumably in full working order. It’s neither stylish, nor stereotypically beautiful, yet we can only assume it does the job intended perfectly. Does this make it any less important, necessary or indeed stunning than Rome’s Sistine Chapel, or London’s Westminster Abbey? Something so masterfully created will always bare the same burden of importance to the world, if not to the eye. We must work with what’s available and make the most of our wares. Rather than discard an object for something more appealing, we must remember that an item doesn’t need to hold great beauty to have value or be desirable. If something’s broken, why discard it? Why not see what can be salvaged and created from the wreckage.

Life’s not static and as we’re forever changing, so does the unique beauty and diversity surrounding us. We’re a wasteful world and, to me, this image works as a bold statement delineating the world’s throwaway culture, the precious elements of life and death and the balance between our ever-mutating views on appearance, worth and necessity.

TEXT G written by Matthew MacKisack, an artist and writer based in London. He is a teacher and doctoral researcher in the Art Department at Goldsmiths
College.



To begin with description: the image shows white figures on a green ground, seen from a viewpoint about 30 degrees over the horizontal. One of these objects, in the foreground, is shown completely; four others, irregularly distanced from each other, in the background, are cropped by the frame.

The one whole object seems to consist of a base and superstructure. The base is an upturned funnel shape, in which there is the reflection of a window and what could be the silhouette of the photographer. On top of that is a horizontal form with five roughly semicircular extensions, similar to how a child might draw the outline of a flower, the extensions being petals; the overall impression of the object is floral. The horizontal part's surface is matte and rough, as if calcified – unlike petals – but builds at its centre up to a stamen-like protrusion. The green material – a carpet's pile can be made out in the foreground – that the white objects are on may stand for grass. A straight line in the material, going diagonally across the top of the picture, suggests the joining of prefabricated sheets.

Continuing the description into association, we could say that the white objects do look like flowers, and their constituent material like icing sugar; then again, the white objects are equally like islands, and combined with their phallic central structure, could suggest a male, autistic isolation. We can thus associate the objects into an interesting, potentially affective, blend of gender stereotypes. But more pressing than questions of association or affect is that of how the image is presented: whether the viewer is meant to be (a), looking at the image as a photograph, or (b), looking at the objects represented by the photograph.

In the very top left corner of the image there is an out-of-focus triangular area where the green ground ends, a rhomboid of gray is visible, and a white area in turn completes the triangle. The viewer assumes the gray shape to be the floor and the white part to be the wall. Two black lines cross the gray rhomboid, in parallel with the line in the green material. These look like electrical cables, because the one on the right diminishes to a sliver where the gray meets the white, as if retreating over an edge. This is troubling: it would mean that the white area cannot be the wall, but instead an indeterminate area of illumination, somewhere beyond that which is not the concrete floor but some sort of platform.

Thus the top left corner both answers the question and questions the answer. If (a) was the case, then that corner section would not be included. The white, gray and black of the corner are contingencies that a complete fictional world of white 'flowers' and green 'grass' would exclude. The viewer, on the contrary, is meant to 'forget' the photograph and engage in (b), which entails positing the represented objects as actual, in actual space, continuing to exist somewhere. The blue light and the accidental reflection of the window help in this. But the top left corner also tells the viewer that they should be scrutinizing objects in spatial reality whilst simultaneously undermining that reality, by not allowing them to ascertain the limits of the space and suggesting something indistinct lying beyond it.

The viewer, then, has to conclude that the inclusion of the white and gray corner is a double bluff and that the corner is part of the image's fictional world; they pass through (b) back to (a).