Duncan Butt Juvonen :
The Sea, The Sea (Hall 1)

Eight years ago, my father had died. I made an animation of a gravestone screensaver that glided around a screen effortlessly and endlessly, pinging off the screen limits in a maddening loop.  

But I wasn’t sure what to do with my floating gravestone.  

Three years ago, a morbid epigram by Paul Valery that served as an epigraph in a book got jammed in my head:   
‘Good-bye,’ says the dying man to the mirror they hold in front of him. ‘We won’t be seeing each other anymore.’  

I made a short animation of that too, which I also didn’t quite know what do with. 
 
Then, while working on this show, a sea theme had emerged and I had the idea to project the ghost gravestone over close-cropped footage of waves, filmed at Mort Point in the UK. For no good reason, the Iris Murdoch book title, The Sea, The Sea, kept springing to mind. I then found out that the name of that book was in fact taken from a Paul Valery poem, ‘The Cemetery by the Sea’.   

Surprised by another link to Valery – a poet completely unknown to me – and as the name of his poem was very much on topic, I then looked into the poem and found out that it was inspired by the coastal cemetery of his birthplace, Sète, the cemetery in which he was eventually buried. I then found a picture of his gravestone there, which had a column topped with a cross that looked just like the pixel gravestone I had drawn for my animation 8 years back.   

The maddening loop seemed to have come full circle.  

The show addresses the passage of time, death and decay, offest with brightly coloured walls and Op Art stripes.   

The images in this show are glitched, obscured. The colours are sucked out, bleached out of the pictures, washed off and abraded like something washed up on the shore. The messages are incomplete, the information decayed and interupted. A deer smokes a pipe and contemplates a body of water.   

A heavy sea swells, over which a ghost-like pixel-art gravestone glides, pinging around the screen with a fluid, swift, unnatural and indefatigable speed.  

In contrast to the decay and sapped colours, the black and white Op Art stripes create queasy waves of colour in the viewer’s eye where there is no colour. 

Notice! Opening hours: Tuesday–Thursday 12–6pm, Friday–Sunday 12–4pm (the exhibition ends on Saturday, September 19th)