Signals Stations – a brief intro

Text from a talk in respect of the exhibition Signal Stations (April 2026)

The following is a passage from Italo Calvino’s The Tavern of Crossed Destiny which I was reading recently and felt connected with my work as I read it :

‘The tale’s thread is tangled not only because it is difficult to fit one card to another, but also because, for every new card the young man tries to align with the others, ten hands are outstretched to take it from him and insert it in another story each one is constructing, and at a certain point his cards are escaping him in all directions and he has to hold them in place with his hands, his forearms, his elbows, and so he hides them from anyone trying to understand the story he is telling.’

The sense of a gathering of stuff together in a futile or frustrated effort to construct something or keep the parts of his story together resonates with me and the processes of my work.

I was also prompted to think of a my work in a picture of an old bookcase I came across, full of varying colours of the spines and heights and widths. Like the variations in a frequency reading – and an array of messages being sent out through colour and form and of course in the case of a bookcase the message signalled by the titles and authors on display, whether to the self or others

In the text to accompany this exhibition Jack Kinsman wrote about the sense of archive in this work and the sense of material history , but crucially that the memory is both maintained and lost in an archive.

Like the book collector.

Walter Benjamin wrote about the same in his essay cum talk ‘Unpacking my library’

‘Thus there is in the life of a collector à dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order. Naturally, his existence is tied to many other things as well: to a very mysterious relationship to ownership, … also, to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional … useful-ness-but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate. The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property …the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.’

I’d read this essay some years ago and not thought about it recently yet it feels like it is present in some way and brings an extra layer to the work.

The sense of spaces created and filled. The different elements jostling for space and yet also making the space that another piece can fit. All reliant on one another. And a sense that the piece could as easily dissemble before us as remain the same. Whatever message it’s sending being lost to whatever pattern and message emerges.