I like to think about my works as functioning like landfill sites, where layers of material history sit together simultaneously, decompose at varying rates, and create slippages across time. This results in works mainly in video, audio, sculpture and text, that strategically move between the minor, micro or ephemeral, to the major, macro and the enduring. For me the landfill is a place where temporalities, hierarchies, values and knowledges are loosened, undone and attributable in new ways.
The Everted Rim of a Vase
The everted rim of a vase, was an exhibition of sculptures and sound by myself and my father Ian Kane. Ian's work responded to the contemplative nature of exhibition spaces formerly use as a chapel. While mine started from the gaps between written and verbal language to evoke a landscape. Central to both of our works is was the creation of relationships to time and history through materials. Link to audio: https://vimeo.com/485516345/fb5c9384b8
Plough
Plow took the transcription of a diary from 1919 by my ancestor Alexander Johnstone as a starting point. In his diary Alexander grapples with a forming egalitarian politics, records home remedies and adapts lines of poems into the news of the day. The exhibition puts the process of drafting and the rebuilding of disparate parts at its centre. Where support structures for sculptures come prior to what is held, and fragments, sketches and underdrawings take precedent to what is fixed and finished
Material Context
Plow took the transcription of a diary from 1919 by my ancestor Alexander Johnstone as a starting point. In his diary Alexander grapples with a forming egalitarian politics, records home remedies and adapts lines of poems into the news of the day. The exhibition puts the process of drafting and the rebuilding of disparate parts at its centre. Where support structures for sculptures come prior to what is held, and fragments, sketches and underdrawings take precedent to what is fixed and finished
Grafting
The exhibition comprising of a 4-channel audio work, digitally printed mural and series of sculptures, formed an intimate network of people, things and places. These relationships were framed through reference to the horticultural technique of grafting. The exhibitions central element was a mural comprising of multiple images, a 'film' in which the element of time was removed making it exist in a perpetual present.