INTRODUCTION :
‘Thresholds (The Unnamed)’ is a major multimedia international mixed exhibition curated by Joseph Clarke. It available to view online from 10am, Saturday 4/12/2021.
The exhibition includes artworks by: Massimo Angei, William Arnold, Simon Averill, Paul Benney, Gabrielle K Brown, Jim Carter, Mat Chivers, Gabriel Tendai Choto, Kate Clark, David Cooper, Judith Nangala Crispin, Phoebe Cummings, Claire Curneen, Roy Eastland, Laura Ford, Luke Hannam, Andrew Hardwick, Andy Harper, Rebecca Harper, Youki Hirakawa, Simon Hitchens, Henry Hussey, Sax Impey, Arthur Lanyon, Andrew Litten, Jamie Mills, Shiri Mordechay, Barbara Neil, Richard Nott, David Quinn, Peter Randall-Page, Jonathan Michael Ray, John Robinson, Tim Shaw, Roger Thorp, David Kim Whittaker, Evelyn Williams, Amy Gillian Wilson, Joy Wolfenden Brown and Carlos Zapata.
ONLINE CATALOGUE :
“I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray, I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts...”
Samuel Beckett,’ The Unnamable’, 1953
THRESHOLDS (THE UNNAMED) :
Stories. A meme just flashed, too brief a moment, no more than a few seconds, which said (and who knows if it is true): “In every breath you breathe in you inhale 10^19 atoms… Every breath contains atoms from every person that is alive now and has ever lived.” That feels like big news, flicking by in the blink of an eye. Put down the phone. Why would we ever feel so alone?
Beneath the surface smile, beyond a heart engorged with love, ripened by social and familial contentment and professional achievement, lies an emptier and fearful void. Is the aim for it to become filled with a clarity of knowing or a deepening of mystery? There remains forever, doubt in truth and certainty in untruth. A perpetual pushing against a potentially desolate state of being in the waiting of those whispers of magic that may reach us on the wind, lifting up for a moment on to the broad shoulders of forever. There is purpose in a searching for poetry in the contemplated understanding of this, among other dichotomous states of duality that we are perhaps not alone in finding ourselves locked in.
The artworks selected for this presentation with a degree of spontaneous intuition have not been done so to offer any conceptual solutions. Instead because they ‘feel’ to me to occupy a hovering space of unknowing or perhaps even a quietly humming place of gestation and potential – a captured moment within the fog of existential liminality, providing a threshold, which I hope, through recognition or affirmation, might offer the potential to connect.
Joseph Clarke, 2021
EXHIBITION ARTWORKS (CLICK FOR FULL DETAILS) :
“Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.”
Samuel Beckett,’ The Unnamable’, 1953