A continuous moving shot of pebbled ground is accompanied by the audible crunch of feet running on loose stones. A video created for the group exhibition Running on Pebbles: through-lines with incidents and increments, Snakepit, Auckland 17 February –1 March 2012, curated by Allan Smith.
Perhaps we still haven’t really learned what Allen Curnow called “the trick of standing upright here,” and maybe that’s a good thing. Perhaps we realise, after all, it was always a trick, a temporary contrivance anyway; something precarious. The exhibition then is about finding one’s way in a tilting, shifting world; of finding one’s bearings through adapting rhythmically and exactly to altered gradients and interruptions; about experiencing the world as a rain of data. It suggests different tempos for working with inversions, inventions, obstacles, diversions; for forming provisional tracks through a landscape on the move; amidst an infinity of objects, ensembles and directional variance. It is about falling, slipping, rhyming. It is about a speculative, projective improvisation that is both material and ideal. It’s about accepting the varying degrees of success and failure of attempts find purchase in a world of erosion, grace, and intermittence.
