I picked up an exhibition catalogue one day for a show called ‘Flights of Reality: A General theory of Relatively Everything’ which was on at Kettles Yard 2002. It involved five artists Charles Avery, Matthew Ritchie, Keith Tyson, Grace Wier and Keith Wilson. The catalogue read in abstract terms – “Thoughts in progress mapping out patterns of the possible”, “the debris of ideas that remain in the collusion between science and the everyday.” What the exhibition really seemed to begetting at was letting go of our one-faceted view of the world, rejecting the ordering impulse by which we orientate ourselves; maps, calendars, diagrams, lists.

“Far from cohering to a unified view of the way things are, the collision of information, beliefs and systems create a kaleidoscopic vision in which truth and fiction proliferate promiscuously. It seems we are no nearer to any truth, no further away.”

Simon Groom

This was recognition, an acknowledgement perhaps, of the futility of trying to set definitive patterns from the chaos of life itself. Keith Tyson discusses his work as the necessity of leaving room for change, a space for contradiction. “It must re-invent and re-program itself, allow for experimentation and paradox.” He talks about the studio work place in terms of the experimental laboratory where what is hideous may become significant by default. I agree with this statement which is why I am always so loathed to throw anything away. I once read that you should love your artistic disasters like an ugly child. Often my most hated, time consuming mistakes, which I resent for much of my studio time, turn into something else, weighted into different areas. For me at the moment this is a big pile of wires I have paper-mached, too heavy to move, too grim to look directly at, it sits under my table and features in pretty much every subsequent drawing.

I suppose this goes back to Derrida’s second life of outdated objects, if you think that something you find visually displeasing is as obsolete as something that no longer has a practical use. Keith Wilson discusses the personal history of objects also within the catalogue. His job as an artist becomes how to negotiate histories within the present so as to generate new layers of meaning in the future. His is the task of creative recognition or reorganisation ... a facilitator of meaning not a creator. “The difficulty is to resist the instant gratification of a too-easy clarity while avoiding mere obscurantism.”