Co-ordinate, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy
Co-ordinate brings together a series of works that consider the linear mapping of space: internal, perceptual and architectural. The exhibition takes its title from the coordination of mind and body in the everyday act of walking. The first work we encounter, Mean III (2016), acts as a diagnostic tool against which the viewer is invited to measure him/herself. It is paired with the lead work, Into The Light (1985): an early attempt at mapping the surface of the body using the co-ordinates of a geographer’s division of the surface of the Earth.
Throughout the show, the mapping of body and space interrogates both architecture and our own moving state. The exhibition's principle work, Lost Horizon II (2017), foregrounds the co-ordination of all perceptions in the negotiation of an environment. The installation uses 21 kilometres of silk-wrapped bungee to make an interactive zone, inviting physical exploration and allowing the viewer to become the viewed. In negotiating Lost Horizon's forest of 5,000 vertical, taut silk lines, the viewer's field of vision becomes confused. Their passage has to adapt into a willed movement through a space that both resists but also remembers the trajectory of the journey: a trace of vibrations lasting many minutes after that journey has ended. The varied thickness of the bungees confuse the distinctions between foreground, midground and distance, producing an optical field that, like Matrix (2014), is impossible to bring into focus. This gives rise to feelings of dislocation and vertigo in the viewer.