Organon

You make references to tribal art. Is your work not just a form of escapism in its connection to something that is outside your immediate environment and connected to the past?

By not intending to literally transcribe the zeit geist, I feel that perhaps I am better positioned to articulate deeper preoccupations from a view point that extends in either direction from now. In Carola Giedion-Welcker’s introduction to her book published in 1937, Modern Plastic Art: Elements of Reality, Volume and Disintegetation, she says;

Plastic art is visible and tangible. It is derived from the formation of actual bodies.

In periods of great religious activity this art was the vehicle of various cults that enshrined the memory of the departed or symbolized the conception of immortality. Plastic art, therefore, became an essential part of human culture almost from the outset. From the remotest times symbols, which were in no sense attempts at direct portrayal, were employed as intermediaries for man’s relations with the gods, the stars, the seasons, life and death. Their impersonal and spiritual function was part and parcel of a far wider complex of nature, religion and cult, the tribe, or state, and its monuments.

These matters are as relevant today as they ever were. Since the renaissance our relationship with nature has changed as did our collective engagement with religion after the enlightenment. What I am doing is calling on events preceding humanity the concepts of which have a direct bearing on our sense of place in the universe. The debate between Creationism and Evolution is a case in hand. Processes that led to our being here and will continue long after we have gone. At the exhibition Eternal Metamorphosis at the Dissenters Gallery in 2008 a view arose that my work was in some way frightening.  It was a world devoid of people yet full of life.  I consider this exclusion of humanity not one of negation. It is an affirmation of a process on which we depend but have no control. The process of contingency.  Evolution, yes it is the mechanism ascribed to our existence, but contingency is why we are here. The why is so much more potent than the how.

We exist because every single ancestor survived, every single creature that anteceded us for billions of years, the countless fusions of gametes, each and every offspring leading to us survived.  We depend on the original Eve having lived long enough to give rise to further generations of Eves, ad infinitum.  Had a single link in this 3 billion year old chain been broken you and I would not be here.  Chance works this way, a priori the probability is near to zero, after the fact the outcome is absolute certainty. The inbetween is awe inspiring.

I am not escaping into a world of make belief and fiction but confronting head on the fragility and magnitude of all that there is. The work is not about people, it is the result in people. The absence of a human subject says something that could not be said by direct reference to society or the individual. Poetry depends on what is not said and the merest hint is sufficient to open out a new world. In the end all we can ever do is whisper.

J.G. Ballard put it very eloquently,

Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.

— The Drowned World, J.G Ballard, Millennium 1999, p 41.

Traditional dances feasts and adorations of Baraka. from Daniel CDMs™ on Vimeo.

Why do you cite tribal art as a parallel for your work?

Tribal art is direct. It awakes and connects with the imagination in a naked way. The maker is known within his (it is usually a male) community but becomes anonymous further afield. The way of making is prescribed and transcends individual variations. Function is all important and purpose is fulfilled by following rules that are passed down through the generations. Its main function is to connect with and evoke the elements that it represents, guards or contains.

Tribal art, for the want of a better term deals with archetypal matters that are basic to the human psyche.  They serve to engender fear, represent the great phases of life and death, evoke memories and contain the sacred.  The ideas are not sophisticated by taste and fashion but dictated by being directed at the innermost parts of the brain.  Albeit the work can be executed with skill and great sensitivity, these are qualities that the maker brings to the work, the motifs lie outside the individual and are part of a collective language that all humanity can understand. They bring home concepts that work subliminally because they have been found to do so over time.

My work is a direct appeal to deeply embedded archetypal elements.  The subject is not people but goes back in time far beyond anything imaginable.  It is a connection with a past that is so distant that it is not recognisable as our own yet it is ours. My work is obvious and clear because the ideas I work with are axiomatic. Poetry arises out of connections and associations and this is no different. The beauty of our ancestry moves me to express this line of connection. My limitations force me to do so through the medium of  subliminal motifs embodied in icons. Tribal art often goes beyond representation and the work itself becomes the entity invoked.  I do not believe in magic and here is where I part company with my counterpart. However, I do believe in the power of imagination to raise ideas that are not concrete and in this way a magic is conjured that can can stand besides and rival any logic.

What do you mean when you refer to the “invisible destination”?

I am conscious that the majority of the time I am addressing an audience within a context grounded in this world. An aspect of what I do is a call on something that lies outside the mundane and everyday. In a tribal context this entity is a supernatural spirit and the maker must satisfy its demands. I cannot touch this element but it touches me. If the work is to approach what I set out to do, the integrity with which it is put together must be manifest and consistent. In this case I do not overtly display an “intimate self” but mark my sincerity by working on physical aspects that are not always open to the immediate gaze. They are elements that could be omitted but if I were to do so the works would become copies, no more than pastiches made to satisfy some aesthetic whim. This internal reference each work possesses confers an independence to the works which can form an indissoluble nexus with aspects outside their immediate placement. However, the works are not insensitive, reacting to constructive and destructive resonances in their surroundings.

How do you relate your work to contemporary sculpture?

Things have changed in an unprecedented way over the last hundred years. We have rapidly moved from an object based culture to a more conceptual approach. Since the 1960’s sculpture has moved into areas considering the environment in terms of space, time and qualities of location and experience. This paradigmal shift has caused the reconsideration of what sculpture is in profound ways. The artist now considers what  he or she does as a outward moving process of engagement outside purely personal responses to the world. This latter approach is indeed a very short lived phenomenon that arose between the renaissance and nineteenth century romanticism. Art has now expanded into regions that were previously thought outside the prescribed canons. It has claimed territory in such a way that it has lost its core meaning and returned to the pre-renaissance status activating explorations of creativity that require new definitions of purpose, aesthetics and context. We are returning to the point where art is created and can be or not recognised as such, and it will be left for future generations to redefine their view much as we see archeological objects that were made without what we would now call artistic intent as artworks.

I envisage what I do as a lens on an idea. A point of focus of metaphorical significance. In a broad sense a sacred object.  The earliest sculptures are almost invariably associated with some spiritual or religious practice usually representing an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic form. A sculpture mediates space and alter the way we perceive the world. It is this ability of sculpture to engage on a physical level that gives it such a powerful means to then raise questions about our wider relationship with the world.

The tribal craftsman fashioning his idol addresses the less visible areas of a work with as much importance as those clearly on show.  Significance is given to areas beyond what you see, offering the work to an invisible destination, one not of this world.  My work likewise functions as an intermediary transceiver for elements that cannot be seen, existing outside the mundane but nevertheless part of a reality.