EXHIBITION DATES : In person and online from 27/10 - 16/12/23
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INTRODUCTION :
Often uneasy or tragic, irrational or other, Jim Carter’s work is linked to a real world of suffering and transcendence: making sculpture from organic materials as a means of advocacy, atonement or commemoration; shifting to story and the written word as a way to enter emotional and numinous spaces of memory and dream. What appears on the surface to be a wilful disturbance of the remains of organic life in order to fulfil a creative compulsion is intended to be part of a transforming and re-sanctifying process. Taken materials are reconfigured into new forms to express complex feelings of grief and loss, love and devotion, fertility and renewal. Fundamental in this work is a conviction in an irrepressible spirit for regeneration in the world, an imperishable flame that rises most clearly in landscape and the magic and otherness of animals.
ONLINE CATALOGUE :
“Do not grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”
"These scraps of a crow cult - constellations of animal life that brighten as I age - speak of a prolonged leave-taking that shines still, in criss-crossing rays, with invitation for renewal. The old god steals away through cattle droves and the cuckooís flight to the furthest roots, and it feels urgent to ensure that his is a good death, not wrongful or precipitate.
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Granted, though I would that he rebelled by way of these sun spells drummed into wood to summerís end, I am less subtle. I wish for a corrective injury: that rock and bone - the ritual tools that bind each spirit to the work - would extinguish and repel. For I scratched the boundary lines through heath and pool, the scarlet and green of a willow country. There, the cumulative rites, which are the cuts and wounds of a sacrificial animal, met the miscreants with violence, trespassers with occlusion.
I am brittle and would be a churl but my counter rhythm is here softer - one of weight, measurement, enumeration: to thrum benign weathers, set safe limits for suns and rivers, the crooked acre. These last I think of as each a magic square with charms to cloud the whereabouts of rare fires, of vixen and sow. Underneath, the kings and queens are listening in the earth and water, counting the voices of the crows and their number, the summer litters, yields of crab apple and sloe.
First among green tongues, I watch blackthorns withdraw each year in flares of pink and rose, and by the fronds of their December days run the god to dream in holding pattern. Mine are a kind of intercessory prayer, an oppositive magic, but they are, too, prospective and fruitful. They travel on winds that are so strong that the crows give up all thought of straight lines, and are blown from the trees as if from the limits of a containing fire, yellow as the round of the blackbirdís eye.
In the spring, the blossoms will be sticky on the motherís tongue, and her shires will tremble and shake in acts of quiet resistance. With warm breath she will spread nectar of flame through soft bodies of flowers and birds to reach cloud kingdoms. Magpies will gather in the highest branches, and their patterns of flight will not always be of ill omen, but stir instead apostasy in those who hum and haw. I will be augur and gesture so that foxes at least will pass into the haze of a golden night, barking the faithful return. Perhaps, after all, they will dress the buds with signs and wonders. Their god turns over in his sleep, and shadows leak from his body of comets to beguile all comers."
Jim Carter, October 2023
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BIOGRAPHY :
Jim Carter was born in Worcestershire in 1967. He received an MA with distinction in Art and Environment from Falmouth University and an MSc Award in Ecopsychology from the Centre For Human Ecology, Edinburgh. His work has appeared in Dark Mountain, Unpsychology and Earthlines magazine.