MALCOLM BARRETT

About

Malcolm Barrett

My work frequently concerns intervention into specific spaces. The intervention relates to a space, in terms of its past and/or the encounters with experiences found in the walking through the spaces or surrounding spaces. Sometimes visual references are made to works by others (eg Bosch’s ‘Garden of Worldly Delights’ in the film-work Fugium 1 and Aqua).

Being trained as a painter there is a strong association with drawing, and early interventions or works for specific spaces are reflected in the development of work that challenged the traditional form of painting where canvasses were always rectangular and flat. The challenge for me, then lead to using layered and discontinuous or multiple serial shapes, especially where they drew on an early interest in medieval painting (eg triptychs) as well as serial forms both by using canvass, mixing oil and acrylic paint, mixed media and other works on paper.

By 1989 works had already embraced different mediums derived from the space the work was to be introduced into (eg painted layers on ply wood, the introduction of gold leaf which was then obliterated (eg ‘Station (Fall 1’)), or the use of found plastic forms and the use of melted tin). Soon after that date, digital film was also being explored for its very transient qualities and sense of change (eg ‘Pilgrim’ that uses a S/N 14 mile line from the City of London to Waltham Abbey and back along the River Lea, a shorter N/S 12mile line using digital images of a randomly chosen form in one direction that is then searched for at every mile but with total freedom on the return).

Since 2004 a number of film-works have been ‘presented ‘ within forms such as boxes, cabinets, drawers, frames, table tops, cases etc. These forms reflect the nature of the space and are derived from or even use common domestic form. They challenge the notion of film as passive remote entertainment, even to having found objects presented alongside the filmwork (eg earth) that have been discovered on specific walks. For example ‘Isabella’s Progress’ is a 14 mile W/E walked line that was an apparently relatively private journey or Royal progress and so films and works relate to the original journey through the closed ‘draws’. The draws also contain bookworks or prints that have been worked over in gouache, graphite, chalk etc. and objects picked up en route. Other works may relate to time as a space or reflect an internal space and its uses. Importantly film allows for large spaces and a multiplicity of viewpoints to define the space and its changes, and the work although can be seen remotely is nevertheless optimised for local engagement (eg Three Gardens was viewed inside a church at a time when the so called subject would be uppermost in the viewers mind).

Trailer (3 min) for ‘Aqua - six margins of Lethe’. A 2024, 20 min short film work for a walked linear space following a chalk-stream from its formation and source in a utopian sub-urban community and it outfall as it leaves the community. Perhaps it should have been better called, ‘Aqua - Six events in two movements in the margin of Lethe’ as although is visual structure is formed by a Fibonacci sequence (the six events) the volume of sound changes significantly, halfway through the footage, creating two sound movements. Sound is edited sound mostly found on site,

The visual and sound content is interpretted as a landscape in Hades where the river Lethe allows one to forget much of the past. This only became apparent as all the headwaters were found to have dried up (possiibly by over extraction of water for a continually enlarging community) and the course of the flow had been buried with many people unaware of its course. Where it did emerge briefly it appeared that any content of water that was coming down, was highway run off and thus polluted. It is this part of the stream that was the most noisy.

Even then when it does escape the clutches of engineers its flow is still slowed by the ugliness of broken SUDS that seem to deny the river has natural life and flooding is part of that life. There are references to Cerebus the dog that protected anyone leaving Hades and thus any further descent and figures of people walking the ground but captive within their own restraints and separate from the reality they could explore (ie the figures found in Bosch). Brueghals images of old trees as places of temptation (in Luxuria) were also found in these lower sections of water and many of the ‘town meets country headlines’ seem to also be sealed against the reality of natural form by the high fences people build around themselves.

In short it is perhaps strange that a utopian community paid so little attention to an element that without it may not have even have been able to survive let alone been formed. In that sense the experience of this water seemed to show a form of dystopia. The work is accompanied by works on paper that looks at the alleged reality of images where perhaps truer spaces can be sought or acknowledged.