Available to listen to and buy at Bandcamp
Release date: 29 August 2024
Format: digital download. Artwork and typography by Landschaft.
Salix Fragilis Basfordiana: Three Variations. Those familiar with my work will have concluded it is referential, intimately woven into my lived experience as an artist.
Take as a starting point an observation by Francis Bacon*: 'A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object; but there is no tension in the picture unless there is the struggle with the object.' Oh how I struggled in the creation of 'Basfordiana...
This work; a tryptich in the Bacon sense emerged via an exploration on themes suggested by Popol Vuh. Iterations upon iteration evolved the work layers replacing predecesors. Ancestral, evolved. The sonic pallette pushed and pulled in the usual Landschaft way. Each of these three variations a reduction of the one preceeding.
To the work itself: a suspension between tension and torpor. A conradiction of the concept of 'stasis'. Each of the layers, and there are 20+ at various stages of interplay, unvarying. But taken as a whole are a weaving progression. A metaphor of the basketry of Basford if you will. Returning to referential. It has refrence in my mind's eye; an anchorage in the post industrial vestages that remain where I grew up and have returned to. By the Leen, a small river in a shallow valley fringing Nottingham. Lined with the remnants of textile bleaching, soap works and since the dawn of written history 20 or so water mills along it's short course.
Salix Fragilis Basfordiana: the raw material of Basford's basketry industry**, remains as a species, a variety of crack willow, surviving the use it was put to, it's footprint remains in brick and stone; the Alexandra, Springfield, Victoria works ten minutes walk from my home.
Footnote * John Russell quoting, in Francis Bacon, Methuen, 1963: notes by Bacon in his 'The New Decade' exhibition catalog, Museum of Modern Art, 1955.
Footnote ** See: Rodney Cousins' 'A Basketful - Willow Growing and Basket Making in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire pubd Nottinghamshire County Council and Heritage Lincolnshire, 2007: ISBN 0-902751-56-5