Catalogue essay published on the occasion of - Inter-View 2007. Group Show. The Space Gallery. Seoul. Korea
Text by: Dean Kenning

Adam Thompson makes striking use of scale in a practice which engages with the dialectic of representation and the real. A bashed in globe rests on the gallery floor, both minimalist sculpture and the aftermath of some cosmic catastrophe which has rent the Earth’s crust apart. A globe is the most iconic of scale models, implying rational control over the physical limits of the human domain (until recently that is?the astronauts and cosmomauts of the 60s being the first people to gaze back at the home planet as if it were a model; but forty years of space exploration has not brought us beyond its back yard, beyond its gravitational pull). Globes shrink reality millions of times allowing us to hold the world in our hands, and make sense contemplatively of the terrain stretching endlessly before us. In fact, Thompson’s globe is a found object, discovered while on one of his scavenging excursions around the streets of South East London. Worlds collide: the serene intellectual endeavour of the study and the profane, everyday urban grime of dumped rubbish and skips. The object itself betrays an inelegant former life; it is awkward and bulky, (perhaps an abandoned art work?); cracks reveal a thick plaster shell. Now it is a smashed-pumpkin of a globe? the gaping cavern of the interior emphasized illusionalistically with added black paint (the only creative concession the artist has allowed himself).

Black pigment recurs in Untitled(Range), this time in pure powdered form piled on a cable suspended between gallery walls. The blatant physicality of the piece flips to a mountainous silhouette when juxtaposed against its tonal opposite?the white-walled backdrop. It looks like industrial heaps of coal newly excavated from the Earth’s interior. The work brings to mind what Robert Smithson?in his dialectic of representation and real? called non-sites. A gallery, in this sense, is a quintessential encultured, bracketed virtual space enabling so-called reality to be approached. Presented as a ready-made material rather than as an ingredient for traditional image making, the precipitous, uneven line of pigment puts in focus the symbolic function whereby the real can never escape an imaginative ordering?there is no ‘innocent eye’, no nature without culture. Another found object resembles a mossy rock, but is actually an amorphous lump of dried concrete with a chemically-induced patina of green and brown. Originally constituted from excavated minerals this material has become an urban rock?superfluous, unproductive, kicking around. Re-functioned in the gallery it seems to float impossibly against a wall to which it is attached with an unseen rod. On its surface are dozens of plastic model chairs, arranged higgledy-piggledy?on their sides, upside down, scattered on their ground as if washed up in a deluge. Chairs have appeared often on the stage of modern art, from Van Gogh to Bruce Nauman to Sarah Lucas. In their isolated un-sat-upon state they conjure the human body in its very absence, particularly as they mimic the sedentary posture they allow, with their reduplication of limbs and torso?arms, legs, and back. Signs of life then on this craggy island, past life perhaps?

Another ‘rescued’ residue, this time unadulterated. It looks like a natural object?maybe a small section of log. But on closer inspection what appears like splitting bark is seen to be paint chipping away from an old piece of skirting board. Only a man-made object can be abject. But as environmental attrition blasts away the coating and shape that enables us to name this leftover piece of detritus, a magical thing happens. It returns, regresses to its ‘woody’ status, to its original nature. It loses its domestic, encultured function in a process of entropy whereby the Earth reclaims what belongs to it.


Dean Kenning is an artist and art critic and a regular contributor to Art Monthly.