Click the slide to go to the next image.

Credit photos: Rob Harris, Gemma Blackshaw and myself.

In Ruined Time

Tabitha Beresford-Webb, Dane Briscoe, Poppy Eastwood, Leila El-Kayem, Sophie Gough, Molly Grad, Yanting Huang, Krystyna Massey, Maya Sacks, Echo Wang, ML Wrye, Charlotte Yao, Wenqi Zou

Southwark Park Galleries - Part of Unruly Encounters (a show within a show)

18-20 March 2022

///////////////////////////////////////

This exhibition comprised work by students on the MRes Arts & Humanities pathway at the Royal College of Art. Across a range of artistic media, including sound, performance, painting, sculpture, photography, video, and other materials, they explored embodied, artistic forms of time. While approaches varied from the playful to the archival, and the archeological to the clinical, the artists shared a mutual concern in the material processes, physical expression, corporeal shape, and concrete form or structure of time.

There was a particular focus on the notion of ruin and its latent, paradoxical temporalities: a will to explore the material and metaphorical significance of the time that inhabits structures in decay, of bodies or places that have fallen over time, as well as the stories or voices that have been buried or forgotten through the passage of life. Artists considered matters of ecology, territory, history, and the search for shelter; of the messages that nature itself communicates when we take the time to listen to it. There was a claim for reconstructing old narratives, reshaping our collective memory, and reconnecting with our environment.

Bones, relics, falling structures, spores germinating and transforming into moss, fossils, weathered canvases, archival images, voices from refugee camps, archaeological sites, scientific lenses to study the geological past, rusty metal, water in movement, pieces of earth and the absence of bodies captured as sculptural traces or marks… These elements comprised the work on display.

Like archeologists unearthing time, the artists revealed a desire to reconstruct the past or a will to make it come to life once again. The result was the recovery of hidden knowledge, the acknowledgment of the inherent bond between destruction and reconstruction, the recognition that life suggests death in the same way that decay leads to renewal, a reminder that with putrefaction comes rebirth. Above all, perhaps, the artists excavated the potentiality of earth, in which elements change and bodies heal. They awakened the alchemical power of art to transform the ordinary into extraordinary. 

Special thanks to Gemma Blackshaw, Bryony James and Chantal Faust.