Individual Residencies
2022 | Steve Dutton
This was a return visit to The Museum of Loss and Renewal. The last time I was here I described my work as a form of tussle between conflicting forces, agendas, politics, subjectivities and aspirations. While this observation might remain true as a lofty ambition, it should also be said that the means of engaging in that tussle are becoming ever more materially straightforward and grounded in particular spaces and times.
I work with language in the broadest sense, working through drawing, text, writing, speaking, reading, looking and listening and I attempt to move across and through these various modes by allowing each to be inhabited or at least touched by another.
I remain hopeful that by engaging in this way I can allow paradoxes, frictions, fissures and complexities to arrive, a reminder that engaging with contradictions might help energise a life being lived.
In the end, my project in The Museum of Loss and Renewal remains as an opportunity to engage with a simple proposition: that aesthetics might be the ability to think contradiction as a means of being in and out of a world simultaneously.
An incredibly powerful image for me is described in Don DeLillo’s “The Names”, in which the words “the names” are painted in bright red paint in Greek on a rock in the blisteringly hot landscape of the Mani Peninsula. The naming of things also lies at the heart of Ursula Le Guin’s writing.