'IN RETROSPECT' - David Kelvin Guerin

We all look back, don’t we? We recall the problems and periods, the patterns and parallels, the snippets, fragments, inspirations, and partialities - the pieces and parts, to adopt Toni Morrison’s formulation - of life/lives lived; of past places, events, experiences, incidents, resources, or circumstances. We memorialise too. Our memories are an amalgam: of mysteries and strangeness, of preachings or politics or polemics. Of exceptionalisms or the quotidian - the ordinary, the everyday and the utilitarian contrasting with the incomprehensible, the truly horrid, and the transgressive. To not-forget. To learn. We re-imagine aspects and episodes of achievements, and the overcoming of colossal failure(s), catharsis, or errors of judgement and slip-ups. Because no-one is above a slip-up.

Remembering, then, is to be fully human – with the thing adapted and the story evoked, with the particularly-plausible narrative-myth adopted and re-told, with allegory, analogy and metaphor deciphered, with the random object reconfigured and embraced, or with the talismanic artefact deified, intellectualised, or made deictic. Because, as we pursue our truth from the myriad forms of knowing and knowledge, we all battle with the shadows and chimeras of the Cave in seeking our own meaning in life; meanings hidden in things.

This exhibition is called “In Retrospect” for several reasons:

First, it retrospectively looks back through a personal sculptural production spanning decades, and which has traversed a variety of media (predominately stone, wood, metal, and found objects, but also includes a daily drawing project of some standing) and formats. A tapestry of doing and thinking and finding and making: of extemporising, poostling and fluking; of selecting, then blocking-out, whittling, chipping, flaking, knapping, grinding, sanding, and polishing; whakahoangi. Gluing, arranging, and assembling. Juxtaposing.

Second, it harnesses a personal obsession with memory and history as a factory of aesthetic, stylistic, thematic, contextual, and identity-forming inspiration. It seeks out a physical manifestation for that famed “other country” that David Levinthal has so memorably called the past; for presence, and the present, is simply a continuum of all amassed pasts, forever cycling within/without. The moment; a contested/contestable notion of existence that we might call time; the space/place of being here now. And of things standing for other things.

Third, what does it take to represent ephemeral notions such as memory and time in three dimensions? By borrowing, appropriating, or altering past (cultural) forms in incremental and minute ways? Inching, as Yeats so gloriously intoned, towards Bethlehem? (Sorry, that should read “slouching”.) For, while the only truth surely in life is death, retrospectivity fills the gap between: memoir, diary, the epistolary, biography/auto-biography, self-writing, sketching, day-dreaming, cloud-gazing and mental-musing wrapped up in one? And all these allied to or underlying the laborious, repetitive, time-consuming methodologies of addition and/or removal. Of muscle-power and focused intention. Of stamina and obsessiveness, and the eternal “real” world needs to place a dollar-value on all endeavours and the rule of bottom lines and profit margins justifying the piper’s demand to call “his” own tired tune?