Nigel Ayers

Nigel Ayers & Caroline K interviewed in 1983

2008-08-10T08:52:00.000-07:00

Nocturnal Emissions
Interview by Dave Henderson
Sounds June 11th 1983

"What we're faced with is the same as everybody else. A constant barrage of media, education, music, film, coming at us all the time. People are told, forced and trained to be obedient, destructive consumers totally cut off from the world they live in."

[photo by Steve Pyke]

"THE ONLY records that I've constantly liked have been Beefheart really."

Nigel Ayers admits all! Well not quite. Nigel is half of the nucleus of Nocturnal Emissions and along with fellow northerner Caroline K, the Nocturnals are an industrious and testing outfit of fluctuating size with three LPs and several cassettes to their credit.

Their most recent vinyl offering 'Drowning In A Sea Of Bliss' reveals a much more structured approach to their music and rumour has it that current recordings, with an enlarged line up, are a mutant son of dance music. But music is merely the tip of their iceberg and the Nocturnals, partially shrouded by their record label Sterile, are an outfit who've been flirting with media traditions in more ways than one.

“I'm totally fed up with industrial music now,” continues Nigel, "we've only really been linked with that because we use electronics. That's bad because it confuses the ideas. We do things for our own reasons, we've got no fascination with Moors murderers and we're not particularly interested in industry either."

True enough the rock tradition of tarnishing everything that's, say, a little different with the same bleak brush doesn't work here.

Caroline: "Images of death have just become like a style and it doesn't have any
meaning anymore because it's so clichéd. A lot of the fanzines and letters that people send us just make you feel pretty ill first thing in the morning when you open them. It's just like a fashion and we want to steer clear of it."

Fact: Nocturnal Emissions cannot be mistaken for pop predictability.
Their sound is a well honed tool and a well researched one at that.

Nigel: "We read loads of stuff about psychology and acoustics and things like that which we apply to our music. To some extent it's got to the stage where we can pick an effect that a record is going to have on people and it seems to just work like that."

The technique is intriguing and also has many reference points to other musics.

Caroline: "We take all the best bits out of different sorts of records. There's loads of different types of music that you might just like bits of and the rest pisses you off, so you take little elements and mix them up with other bits and you make something out of the mixture that has an overall feel to it.

"It's a technique of integrating all the sounds we like and all the ideas we like as well, it's a kind of audio collage. I suppose it would be more popular if we just stuck to computer noises or metal bashing then people would be able to identify with it more as it was more consistent but we'd get bored with it."

Nocturnal Emissions can't really be likened to anyone. The beauty of the whole thing - which is currently moving into the live arena and includes more diverse projects such as animated films - is the variety. Not just the variety in tracks but the width and depth which they are able to create within tracks.

Like an habitual chameleon they change but not to blend in with their surroundings, always intentionally attempting to be one step ahead.

Nigel: "Things just lose their potential once everyone is doing the same thing so you have to move on to what's not been exploited yet. What we've been concentrating on really is getting the content over, just attitudes, like how people can make choices in what they do if they just set about it.

"We're trying really to show up what's going on in everyday life, what's happened to us and the influences that are working on us. The sounds that we use relate to experiences that we've had and the whole thing has to do with an expression of what . it feels like for us to be around. We're hoping that people can identify with that rather than just on a noise level or a record collecting thing."

Nocturnal Emissions are already changing their colours leaving behind a healthy set of recorded artefacts. Predictably unpredictable they will emerge with yet another musical scoop that will be watered down and popular at some future, as yet, undisclosed date.

Their most recent communiqué reveals that they will be performing live at the Ritzy, Brixton on election night. Presenting the world premier of 'The Foetal Grave Of Progress' they are billed as the unique, important, seminally unorthodox and funky Nocturnal Emissions. Who could ever doubt them?

DAVE HENDERSON
Sounds June 11th 1983

see www.earthlydelights.co.uk/archive

Caroline K - Now Wait For Last Year

2008-08-07T03:09:00.000-07:00

An unofficial download of Caroline's solo album can be found here
please leave them a comment

Whatever happened to Nocturnal Emissions' old crowbar?

2008-08-05T11:54:00.001-07:00

Luther Blissett and others..

2008-08-05T11:25:00.000-07:00

Vittore Baroni and some artists' books

2008-08-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

Vittore Baroni on Mail Art exhibitions

2008-08-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

Caroline K (1957-2008)

2008-07-14T13:59:00.000-07:00

I’m sorry to have to report that Caroline K (aka Caroline Kaye Walters) died during treatment for leukaemia in hospital in Pisa on Saturday evening. She was suddenly taken ill and diagnosed with leukaemia a very few days ago. The hospital did all they could for her. Caroline was a long term friend and co-founder of Nocturnal Emissions back in 1980. She married my brother Danny in 2001 and they moved together to Italy that year. They lived with numerous dogs, cats and chickens in a small friendly village in Tuscany. I last spoke to her on Friday and remained in email contact. Caroline was aware of the seriousness of her condition but remained extraordinarily positive and lucid. She chose to keep her illness private and spent her last few days in hospital painting and writing songs.

photo: Caroline K with Danny Ayers in Exeter, November 2007

Fault Line

2008-06-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

Anti-occult Cinema

2008-06-20T05:32:00.000-07:00

Weapons Inspection at RAF St Mawgan 2003

2008-05-17T04:29:00.000-07:00

Bolster Day in Chapel Porth, Cornwall

2008-05-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

Scratch and Run

2008-05-02T04:41:00.000-07:00

SCRATCH AND RUN
CITY LIMITS OCT 5-11, 1984
Cover feature by Andy Lipman

• Press ‘play’. Guillotined battery hens are falling into an Electrolux mixer. Riot police storm hair spray adverts, electrode-manipulated laboratory rats collide with stuttering newsreaders, the buckle of a straightjacket is refastened endlessly. The sound is a low melancholic drone of synthesised echoes and radio static. Eject. This is `Bleeding Images' by Nocturnal Emissions.

• Press ‘play’. Goose-stepping soldiers in Red Square receive the salute from Thatcher and Heseltine at the Conservative Party Conference. The Saatchi Tory logo, an ice-cream cone with flames leaping out, blurs into the hammer and sickle. Lady Di glides by waving to the beat of New Order's `How does it feel to treat me like you do?' Eject. `Scratching for a new texture' by the Duvet Brothers.

• Press ‘play’. Sultry eyes blink on screens within screens. Joan Crawford slaps William Holden. Violins play a distant tango, interrupted by snatches of dialogue from Hollywood melodramas. Floating layers of images are washed away by seeping pinks and crimsons, like the jelly blobs in those novelty table lamps. Eject. `Polka Dots and Moonbeams' by Sandra Goldbacher.

HIP HOP Video, image breakdancing: television does a body-pop. Broadcast TV is scoured for arresting images and fed into video editing systems like shredding machines. The fusion of funk rhythms and visuals on collision course crumble original context. Reassurance and sweet reason, television's facade, disintegrate before your bombarded eyes.
Paul Maben of `Protein Video' hands over the choice of images to a computer, attempting to simulate an organic, visual osmosis. His ambition is to mix sound and vision live. Grand Master Flash toasting live broadcasts with pre-recorded tapes. Image-rapping in a video disco.

George Barber takes the innately seductive quality of TV to mix colour, shapes and movement into hypnotic, fluid sequences. The screen becomes a crystal ball, triggering the subconscious. TV as the Dream Machine.

The Video Lounge at the Fridge in Brixton, with its 20-screen TV installation (presently moving house and re-opening on December 1st) has provided one of the few exhibition venues in London for scratch video to reach a wider audience. Now established video-makers like Derek Jarman, Cerith Wyn Evans and Richard Heslop are joined by bored TV addicts with a lot of state-paid leisure time on their hands, and a video recorder in the front room.

Scratching is so simple. Just playing with the TV remote-control console, quickly switching stations at random, is a basic scratch. What emerges isn't just a jumble of voices and images but the personality of broadcast TV itself. Its self-importance, its hectoring, its banality and plastic smile.

It's just this attitude to television which unites the diverse offerings of video-scratchers. The focus isn't narrative film genres, or individual TV programmes, but the effect of television on tap, the stream of the schedules. It was only a matter of time before television got the scratch treatment. We had to wait for the tools of TV and video to fall into the `wrong hands'.

An idea of this attitude might be an all-nighter of the movies ‘Koyanisquatsi’, ‘Atomic Café’, and ‘Videodrome’ with maybe the ‘Animals Film’ thrown in. That's a world out of control, a victim of technology’s own mindless momentum, with a humanity hopelessly alienated from nature, and, via the mass media, image-numbed into unreality. Scratch prescribes ‘Close Encounters of the Subliminal Kind’ as the antidote.

The latest tape from Brixton-based multi-media outfit, Nocturnal Emissions is called `The Foetal Grave of Progress'. It leaves you feeling you've just witnessed the final death-throes of a civilisation, sadly ours. All its past traumas flash by in seconds, before the last electronic bleep and oblivion.
The soundtrack is an aimless, pathetic whine punctuated with snatches of speech, traffic and baby chuckles, as if we're on remote control search for meaning amongst the image debris of an information overdosed world. Tanks at portside, radar scanners, smoke and rubble vie with fish fingers and toothpaste ads for our fleeting attention. The pulse of the Ghost in the Machine.

Such preoccupations inform Nick Cope's 391 scratch, `The View From Hear' clearly signalling that we should learn to `listen' to television, like music, rather than watching and analysing for meaning like the way we read books. Western culture prioritises sight over hearing, scientific rationality over intuition and feeling. Conventional television reinforces such myopic awareness, and information is packaged into easily digestible stories, whether it's the news or a soap. The problem is that the bits don't add up to a whole. To understanding.

391 draws scratchers in Sheffield and Nottingham together, and developed out of local fanzines, after they got bored with just covering bands, records and gigs. Like the Nocturnals and another Sheffield group, the Anti-Group, they see video as part of a broader movement to stage multi-media events, incorporating scratch sound, multiple film and slide projections as well as video installations.

Cope is fond of quoting Situationist writings to explain what he does. `Work follows the random fragmented path that our mind takes every day, turning from dream to reminiscence, from nightmare to prescience, from the longings for objects to the longings for sex. As the foundations crack, our society follows this pattern, as random event piles on random event, and like a drowning man the past of all ages flies before our eyes. Instead of imposing order, this vortex is received and celebrated, then concentrated into a force of unexpected power.’

Which is probably where Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV come in. Armageddon cultists and William Burroughs devotees, Psychic TV give innocent entertainment a very bad name. Which is just as they intend.
Their live performances of sensory over-kill, employing extreme imagery of satanic sex rites or spoof christian ikonography are experiments in mass disorientation. `Altered States' tests attempting to free the spirit from predictable control. Like those voodoo dances which induce trance-like states. If television's the opium of the masses, will orgiastic communal séances such as these be the bingo of the
future?

William Burroughs predicted as much in `Wild Boys' back in 1968. Along with punk style ('the chic thing is to dress in expensive tailor-made rags and all the queens are camping about in wild-boy drag') he gives us The Penny Arcade Peep Show-moving multi-screen video boxes, enveloping us in a fusion of sound and vision. `Fragmentary glimpses linked by immediate visual impact ... a sensation of speed as if the pictures were seen from a train window.'

Frankie's `Two Tribes' is inspired by Mad Max II, a wild boy if ever there was one, and Marc Almond is signed up to star in the movie of Burroughs' book. Doublevision in Manchester distribute scratch videos of Cabaret Voltaire and 23 Skidoo, and the IKON/Factory label have just brought out `The Final Academy Documents', the early film scratches of Burroughs and Anthony Balch. The Rough Trade shop in Notting Hill stocks a small range of independent scratch cassettes.

Scratch has arrived. But will the media, as usual, simply detach the style from the substance to market newer bands and consumer durables? Charlotte Street becoming the new Kings Road?

Video-scratching is an inter-active response to the one-way arrogance of broadcast television. And perhaps the growing accessability of the medium, both for creating new messages and distributing alternative information, gives some hope. A flick through the extensive library of London Video Arts in Wardour Street, or the Videotheque at the ICA shows just how adept video-makers have been in subverting conventional expectations.
Clive Gillman's `Warning, Attack and Recovery' demonstrates the economy of scratch, and the irrelevance of soap-opera narrative, by saying in eight intense minutes what `The Day After' and `Threads' took hours to say. While Graham Young's `Ships, I See No Ships' brilliantly debunks the show-biz jingoism of a post-Falklands military tattoo, scratching the antics to a reggae steel-drum soundtrack.

Steve Hawley's `Science Mix' is a hilarious parody of TV commercials, mixing archive '50s soap powder ads (including a genuine no tangle wash-tub clip where radioactive clothing is rinsed static-free!) with present-day versions.

And Jez Welsh's 'IOD' (Information Overdose/Imagine Other Destinies) lays image over image in abstract, geometric designs, weaving around a soundtrack of buzzing radio frequencies, distant telephones and DJ bilge. As with much scratch video, the idea of image pollution, and our so far unrecognised need to develop an ‘ecology of information’, permeates the work.

Can video wean us off our addiction to the dominant television habits so assiduously nurtured by consumer capitalism? Certainly it can claim to have established itself as a specific creative medium, no longer in hock to the codes and language of film narrative or broadcast television. And scratch brings together the fluidity of videoediting, more akin to sound-mixing than montage film techniques, with a healthy critique of the mass media.

But are we ready for it? And with the absence of social exhibition venues, will most people ever be challenged to think differently about the sort of information they receive and how they consume it? When confronted with the apparent incoherence of scratch, are we prepared to suspend our critical faculties-in order to re-discover them?

If television is our shop window on the world, scratch has just chucked a brick through it, and is busy looting 30 years of goodies, with abandon. Will the results be inflammatory or wallpaper?

See Video Listings for details of forthcoming exhibitions of scratch video at ICA Videotheque, London Video Arts and Moonshine Arts Centre.

Andy Lipman
CITY LIMITS OCT 5-11, 1984

Thistle

2008-03-25T11:13:00.001-07:00

If I was a Cyborg

2008-03-16T04:51:00.000-07:00

Get Your Cyborg Name

Nocturnal Emissions live in Murcia

2008-03-11T12:41:00.000-07:00

Progressive Political Pornography

2008-02-20T08:33:00.000-08:00

There was something very Freudian about the Cold War.

Another Step Closer to Reality

2008-02-19T06:37:00.000-08:00

I'm dusting off some vintage graphics for a vinyl box set of the early '80s NE recordings that's coming out shortly. When I say "graphics", I mean a lot of cut & pasted images snipped out of magazines and tatty black and white photocopies. It was progressive political pornography I was doing back then.

The original of this particular image was a collage clipped from the Sunday magazines then made into a dozen A3 photocopies,courtesy of a friend who had an office job with British Gas. It was used as a pull-out in Rock Wilson's Apocalypso A Go Go 'zine, and I also saw it recycled in the situationist-inspired 'zine Anti-Clockwise.

I never had access to Photoshop back in the day. Or should I say, “the means of production of this type of imagery was under much tighter control by the military industrial complex”? Or should I say Photoshop hadn't been invented yet?

Any which way, I never got to do this picture in colour before. It's nice to be able to re-shape monochromatic photocopies into something like how I imagined they should have looked.

Nocturnal Emissions shows coming up

2008-02-17T01:11:00.000-08:00

March 6 2008: El Centro, Murcia, Spain

La música es uno de los lenguajes más abstractos que existen y sin embargo es, posiblemente, el más universal de todos. Esto se ha podido comprobar no ya sólo en la vigencia de obras y autores denominados clásicos en un sentido amplio y en todas las culturas, sino, y más explícitamente desde la invención de los aparatos reproductores, en el grado de repercusión social que ha logrado alcanzar en nuestros días. No es que todo el mundo entienda de música, pero sí es sensible a élla y es capaz de comprenderla, interpretarla venga de donde venga.
Actualmente, para la música popular de nuestro tiempo no existen barreras culturales, idiomáticas, estéticas, ni tecnológicas, o sería más apropiado decir que no deberían existir.
Es precisamente éste el principal objetivo de este ciclo: comprobar y disfrutar esa ausencia de barreras.

http://www.puertasdecastilla.org/detalleActividad.php?id=163&pag=2

April 13 2008: The Cavern, Gandy Street, Exeter, UK with Dieter Muh and The Durds

NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS - INDUSTRIAL - DIETER MUH - THE DURDS - Sun 13 Apr

I know its a long way away but for all you experimental/industrial fans heres something interesting: SUNDAY 13 APRIL - CAVERN - NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS + DIETER MUH Nocturnal Emissions, masterminded by Nigel Ayers and a handful of cohorts, has been investigating the complexities of the human psyche since the early '80s. In its earliest incarnation, Nocturnal Emissions created blistering collages of electronic noise infused with the anti-funk rhythms found in NE's postindustrial colleagues such as SPK, Coil, and Cabaret Voltaire. After a few dodgy attempts at New Wave, Ayers turned his attention to the alchemy of post-Eno ambience. Now, toiling away in his sonic laboratory in Cornwall, England, Ayers conjures delicate refractions of shimmering tones with cosmic touches of '70s electronic work from the likes of Cluster and Conrad Schnitzler. These influences can be readily heard on 1997's Sunspot Activity album, the aural equivalent to looking at the sun. Ayers didn't title any of the tracks on the album, so we've titled the selection presented here "II." While Ayers doesn't appear to be manipulating VLF static or the sferic whistles attributed to sunspots, he has fashioned a beautiful album that mirrors the sun's white hot ambience as it waxes and wanes in deep space. Deep sleepwalker ambient floes continue throughout the 1997 album Omphalos!, until "Arbor Low" slips into hyperdrive with an uptempo breakbeat skitter. Recently, on 2000's Future Antiquarianism, NE's shape-shifting sound has tentatively returned to the beat: drum and bass breaks emerge from the soothing ambient passages in a rather hypnotic take on that manic genre. www.earthlydelights.co.uk/
The Durds will be supporting this show with a special one-off performance by Dan Cray and installation artist Fliss Shillingford. Signed to Banazan Records in california The Durds like to make nasty, funky, folky pop songs and do not care whether they are done on computer, groovebox, Playstation or Spanish guitar. The Durds are desperation-fuelled electrofolk tied to a belief that pop can and should be about anything (this tends to mean the usual tortured artist fare such as violence, decay, illness and unrequited love/lust).
http://www.cavernclub.co.uk/listings.asp?monthID=4#listing3041

Guerilla mail art project

2008-02-15T11:42:00.000-08:00

I just found this site http://www.de-noted.com that is full of images of altered banknotes. So I had to show you this photo of this fiver, as it's got one of my songs written on it, "never give up".

As we move into a more abstract information - based economy, the opportunities for individualising interactions, like handing over altered, worn, mucky cash are lost. It all becomes ones and zeroes. It's not as if money is abolished, it becomes this equivalent information code kind of thing, and the codes get more and more impersonal. So why not strike a blow against the information economy ??? !!!. Take part in this guerilla mail art project :,

Open entry - no returns.

Write a message, or decorate some paper money (any denomination) and send it to:
Mr N Ayers
Earthly Delights
PO Box 2
Lostwithiel
Cornwall
PL22 0DW
UK

And I'll post the best ones on the blog.

Super 8 footage unearthed

2008-02-07T08:43:00.000-08:00

This flickery video is what you might call a "rush" based on some small assemblages I made in 1989. The original footage was shot on Super 8, (this lends organic saturated colours and texture, etc ). I put it through After Effects and some other digital programs this week. I intend to do some more work on this film later - but with it being 18 years in the making, I thought it might be nice to show it in its present state.

Psycho/geography exhibition review

2008-02-04T05:51:00.000-08:00

From: http://www.artcornwall.org/exhibitions/psychogeography_greencube_higheracademyofhappiness.htm

Transition: Curator's Edition

Newlyn Art Gallery Week 1: 23rd to 27th January 2008

psycho/geography

Curated by GreenCube

There is an aura of contemplation in the Upper Gallery of the Newlyn Art Gallery: an otherworldly sound gently resonates throughout the space, like a hi-tech Gregorian chant. Entering the space a noisy and ramshackle apparatus lurches into life, scanning the walls with a dangerous-looking green laser. The machinery is like a survivalist’s farm machine, built from bicycle parts and an electric drill, and powered by old car batteries.

The choral sound 'Aquarius', created by Nigel Ayers, is a generative audio work for eight stereo speakers. The piece apparently began as a 1972 recording of a Cornish male voice choir, singing the popular hit from the musical 'Hair'. It has been subjected to a digital process of exaggerated time-stretching and is now almost entirely unrecognisable.

The spinning laser is 'Wish We Weren’t Here' by Paul Chaney, used previously to create photographs in the landscape depicting the raised sea-levels resulting from global warming.

In 'Raising the Eathorne Stone', by Paul Chaney & Steve Patterson a small DVD player stands on a plinth, and in front of it is a simple A4 plastic display book. This contains a fascinating exchange of letters and emails between artists, mystics, farmers, engineers and archaeologists: documenting the process of discovery and re-erection of a standing stone in a field a few miles away the exhibition space. The DVD has been shot using the obsolete home-movie format of Super 8 film, this lends organic saturated colours and texture to the footage.

In 'Cornish Shrew Mysteries', also by Chaney, a snapshot is enlarged to a colossal size of a hand offering three dead baby shrews to the camera. The photograph is flanked by two small shelves. On each shelf the bodies of shrews are sensitively placed in makeshift shrines; one made from a bird’s nest and the other a tobacco tin lined with fresh flower petals. A small sketch drawn in faint pencil and smaller photographs on the wall describes the discovery of the dead shrews in corners of the artist’s smallholding.

Standing on another plinth is a small open cardboard box. Printed on the lid is a photograph of an arrangement of rocky cairns and a prayer flag on what looks like a Himalayan mountaintop. This is 'Holy Mountain' by Nigel Ayers, labelled as containing 10 Earth samples from the Holy Mountain Brown Willy, and the photograph was in fact taken on that same hilltop in North Cornwall. The black soil samples are contained in neatly labelled clear test tubes. The title reflects the influence of the visionary films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose feature film 'Holy Mountain' was released in 1973. The box can be interpreted as a alchemical cult relic or as a cigar box, referencing the use of cigars in voodoo ritual. It also mimics the format of boxed multiples, intended
as affordable artworks, made by members of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s.

Examining artists’ notebooks we see in their sketches, flashes of insight, which are subsequently realised in the form of painting or sculpture. In the case of Charles Darwin’s notebooks, these insight-flashes led him to formulate the theory of evolution. 'Darwin’s First Tree' by Rupert White grows from the floor and stretches up into the gallery skylights, its aluminium branches glinting in the sunlight. It is a three-dimensional reproduction of a sketch by Darwin in which he first made this diagram of the evolutionary tree of life, where species branch out into sub-species and new life forms emerge as nature grows in increasing complexity.

On the largest wall of the gallery is 'One a day' a series of drawings by Daryl Waller. When I visit, the artist is half way through his series of large ink and pastel drawings made in response to the exhibition. On the first an enlarged drawing of that day’s Western Morning News shouts NEW PUSH FOR GREEN ENERGY. The second re-styles a Roger Hilton drawing with the addition of fluorescent pound-shop stars, in the third DARK TIMES is corrected to ARK TIME as a bleeding figure lies draped over a table top.

Rupert White’s 'Magic Tree' dangles from a rafter. It is an enlarged copy of a car air-freshener cut from a piece of sterling board, a cheap type of builder’s board made from woodchips. On the tree hang a selection of original signed drawings and prints by well-known 20th century St Ives artists: Roger Hilton, Sven Berlin, Bryan Pearce, Alan Lowndes and Denis Mitchell. These are decorated with absurd images of middle-aged people clipped from naturist magazines. The tree is scented with a pungent chemical air-freshener. Hung in this irreverent manner, the St Ives pictures, which have a high value to collectors, take on a different meaning. The faux naivete (or authenticity) for which they are valued assumes a shocking freshness when seen in this context, and these aging drawings once again assume a radical beauty, in many ways mirroring the knowing humour of Daryl Waller’s work.

Nearby, droplets of water cling like glistening jewels to the inside of 'Still (condensation-cube)': a sculpture in which a simple process of condensation converts sea-water collected from Mounts Bay to drinking water. This work by Rupert White alludes both to the human instinct for survival, and to processes of spiritual transformation. 'Psilo' and 'Corporation-tree', two other large sculptures by the same artist rest in the adjacent space. The former is based on hallucinations that have been reported by people taking magic mushrooms, and the latter seems to refer to the artificial planting schemes of out-of-town retail parks.

On the last wall, is 'The Bodmin Moor Zodiac', 12 mysterious silver-framed images based on aerial photographs of areas of Bodmin Moor accompanied by a wood-framed vintage Ordinance Survey map showing the same images in situ. These ink-on-paper images, with the saturated colour of batiks, have been digitally-enhanced to highlight the Rorschach–like images of zodiac signs. This may be a colossal piece of Neolithic land art discovered by Nigel Ayers, or it may be an expression of an attempt to use diagrams, schematics, flow charts to link the real material world with the abstract world of thought and feeling.

Until now, psychogeography has been an urban concept. There is little precedent for the ideas of psychogeography applied to a rural setting like Cornwall and the content of the rural imagination. Most people coming into the Cornwall area are attracted to the experience of the coast. However, the art in this exhibition emphasises an interaction with the interior landscape, both literally in terms of inland areas and
metaphorically in terms of the recesses of the human mind.

In this work, there is shift of emphasis from the visual, to a holistic use of contemporary art tactics. The style is one that has become familiar in terms of sensationalistic Young British art, however the GreenCube artists are very clearly attempting to reclaim the tools of 1960s conceptualism, to charge their work with levels of meaning that have been lost in contemporary art marketing. The mood of the show is contemplative, yet punctuated with the shocks of the postmodern world. A powerful antidote to the globalisation of contemporary art, 'psycho/geography' was an exciting exhibition made by a group of emerging artists sharing a heightened awareness of their geographic and historical location in Cornwall.

psycho/geography was mentored by Steve Messam of FOLD and FRED, Cumbria

Words: Alma Dinger

Greencube Exhibition at Newlyn

2008-01-30T06:09:00.000-08:00

Soul Zodiac

2008-01-24T07:24:00.000-08:00

Greencube Exhibition at Newlyn

2008-01-24T03:17:00.000-08:00

Nigel Ayers displays a set of digitally enhanced images from the Bodmin Moor Zodiac at the Newlyn Art Gallery.

Psycho/geography exhibition this week

2008-01-23T12:18:00.001-08:00

This is what the exhibition looked like this afternoon - photo by Lesley.