COLIN HEMINWAY
Mourn the Absent Object - Behold the Absent Object
PRESS RELEASE 23/04/2016
Project 78 presents Mourn the absent object—Behold the absent object, the first UK solo show of St Leonards-based artist Colin Heminway.
This installation is comprised of six new mixed-media works envisioned as 2D objects latent with 3D potential. Heminway’s multi-media practice explores and challenges the relationship between object and image, his focus shifting between the imagined article, its manufacture or transmission, reproduction, and eventual dissolution.
Intrigued by the ancient theory of ‘intromission to the eye’—the belief that an image is formed of a material part of the object—Heminway is also motivated by his passion for the real or tangible and by a growing unease in our world of pixelated and virtual pleasures.
This juxtaposition of intellectual curiosity and unease eventually fixed upon Heminway’s relationship with the object of the bicycle: an icon of 20th century design that has inspired artists from the Futurist Umberto Boccioni to the Japanese creators of Dekochari or art bikes. For Heminway the bicycle was the object that in childhood first liberated him from adult control, allowing him to explore distance, time, and space alone and on his own terms. Due to recent illness, however, Heminway is no longer able to ride a bike. As a result his artistic investigation of this object-for-movement is infused with a sense of loss and nostalgia that at times verges on fetishization.
In response to his exploration of the bicycle Heminway developed a technique that made tangible the dialogue between object and image. This process, combining elements of drawing and stencil making with screen print and 3D sculpture, plays out as an exchange between the screen mesh (object) and ink (image): between plaster, paint, paper, resin and frame. Allowed to set solid, all the elements are fused together, finally becoming one entity. The result can be regarded as a single sculptural image; the image being evidence of the object—the bicycle—which is paradoxically both embodied within and missing from the work of art.
Press release by Rebecca Hurst