Mike Marshall’s works reveal scenarios and forces that seem to interconnect in ways which can’t always be predicted, and where events are linked to unknown factors that cannot be controlled or precisely defined. Through a combination of observation and staged activity, these new works appear to question the veracity of what we see and hear in the world around us.
For Flood Plain a small set of pot-plants, purchased from a garden centre in India, were photographed then left in the sun to desiccate on an expanse of scorched, cracked earth. With no expectation of survival they will wilt, die and eventually be swept away in an inevitable flood.
Volume and Frequency portrays both a distant group of surfers patiently waiting for a wave, and the physical effects of wind in trees. One shot to another suggests a passing of propellant forces between the two scenarios, whilst a soundtrack employing the musical language of suspense constructs a precise balance between languid relaxation and anticipatory tension.
In No Love No Hate a lone figure can be observed in a hilly landscape using a rotational aerophone; a specially made instrument producing a harmonic tonal sound when rotated through the air from a length of chord. Shot from various vantage points on hills nearby, the sound perceived varies according to the distance it has been recorded. The resulting work seems to describe a particular relationship between activity and environment, and a different way of inhabiting space.
Filmed on-location at Kingston University’s Dorich House Museum, Strange Attractor was specially commissioned to accompany the exhibition Dora Gordine: Artist, Sculptor, Designer, the first major retrospective of her work, showing concurrently at Kingston Museum and Dorich House. Another piece that records the production of its own soundtrack, Strange Attractor explores Gordine’s former home and studio as a confined site of creativity, whilst reaching towards the larger world beyond it. The title is a term, coined by meteorologist and mathematician Edward. N. Lorenz, used to describe how chaotic dynamical systems combine and predict the effects of turbulence, or attraction, between two unfixed points; providing both a degree of predictability and an openness to ‘spill’ beyond any definable limits.
