A. Spackman - Artistic statement

My highly eclectic practice avoids specificity in areas of interest, discipline or formats, actively operating in the uncategorized areas between. My work involves pursuing and orchestrating a wide set of interrelated concerns that are often elusive and difficult to locate. I am interesting in perusing ideas and processes that result in artefacts that oscillate in uncertain ‘flux space’. An ultra thin space of uncertainty where something can become nothing and nothing can become something. Avoidance is also paramount. Avoiding specificity, definition, categorization, solidity and polar opposites. The work is deliberately evasive, slippery and yet carefully avoids the ephemeral.

Previous Works

‘Book A’ – 160 page book of images/photographs – Published by CSAD

Both the potential and difficulty is articulated in the work, Book A, which is a collection of images without hierarchy. Ideas, projects and abandoned projects, time and space coexist and collide, creating a sense of possibilities, and yet at the same time often deliberately mislead the viewer. This work is about avoidance and operating between certainties in order to achieve work that is ‘slippery’, problematic and provisional. The book has an almost childlike restlessness, a mecurial shifting from one idea to the next without assigning value, attempting fixed meanings or locating themes.

The process is often flippant, seemingly wasteful and distracted, and yet visual democracy, empathy, value and micro utopian ideals are also present. Ultimately, everything exists in tension ‘between things’. This tension is both a product and by-product of my own personal intuitive thinking and making processes. I can never quite decide, and so this becomes integral to the work and its potential to explore things. In place of ‘decisions’, are a careful proposal and navigation of circumstances, that push and pull ideas and the work within this flux space. Where and what this space is, is both elusive and alluring at the same time.

Foundation Stone - Kunstverein

Foundation Stone is a physical extension and play on some of these ideas. The work suggests a beginning moment in the history of the space where it is located, although it is not clear where this moment lies. The work is a set statements of proposed projects intended specially for the space. However, any attempt to take these projects forward, beyond merely stating them, would have resulted in an artwork of ‘heaviness’ rather than ‘lightness’ (operating in flux space).

Although the piece is a physical almost sculptural object, it is constructed of materials that themselves have elusive weight and value. Dense blue sponge is a surprising expensive material in relation to its weight and so the Foundation Stone again is moved yet closer to the edge of instability. However, the use of blue sponge also relates to earlier work and activity, meaning the reason for its appearance here is contained both in the work as well as within an internal self referential dialogue in my own practice.