FRAG’MƐNT (TERRA NON-FIRMA)
Using found objects and salvaged materials, Russell A. Beard presents a series of works that touch on deep-time and the cyclical nature of materiality, while drawing on spontaneous chemical and physical processes that deeply resonate with seismic societal and ecological transformations currently underway.
"Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible" -Paul Klee
'BREACH'
Steel, magnetic field, wood & glass, 20x30cm, 2019
2.TRACE
Linoleum & particulate matter from various anthropogenic origins: copper, iron, paint, plaster, epoxy resin, river sediment, 130x175cm, 2019
BLOOD OF THE EARTH (ARTIST- AS- GEOLOGICAL- AGENT)
Soil and water colloid on canvas, 25cm x 60cm, 2019
This sediment, collected from a junk yard in east Lothian is rich with iron oxide particles from decades of decomposed bedsprings and unwanted anthropogenic artefacts.
Named after Leonardo da Vinci's deep insight into the primal power and processes of rivers. This elemental work is not a simple representation of a landscape or a globe in microcosm but a revelation of the actual underlying forces that help form the landscape as we know it and that flow through our bodies and all life on earth. Gravity and the entropic mechanisms of erosion and deposition, the 'epic poem of the earth' (Rachel Carson) helps transmogrify our waste, fragmenting our histories by dispersing, transporting, compressing – in a sense– encoding and uploading our remains onto the planets hard-drive, where it is being stored as sedimentary rock and will be identifiable as the Anthropocene epoch for eons to come.
4. ‘GHOST IMAGE’: ARTIST SELF-PORTRAIT (PETRIFIED)
Bavarian limestone, jojoba oil, sebum, 60cm x 30cm, 2019
A Gum-Arabic solution applied to an image printed directly from the artists face, breaks the hydrogen bonds in the triglycerides of the skin oil, chemically combining sebum and rock in a kind of Auto-bio-lithography’ or petrified self-portrait.
5. EMERGENCE - 541
Cement rubble and rebar found object, Caluna Vulgaris branches
momentarily intercepted from the Pentland Hills, 60cm x 60cm, 2019
This imbroglio of found objects references evolution of life and the emergence of complex adaptive systems. The steel and concrete is redolent of the first signs of visible life, the trace fossils of which mark the beginning of current Phanerozoic eon which began 541 million years ago. The entangled bundle of heather branches serves as a heuristic representation of our networked life-world and the interdependent global ecosystem of which we are a part.
6. AGGREGATE IMPACTS
Glass, iron particles salvaged from workshop floor, plaster, 10cm x
10cm, 2019
Each of these miniature impacts contains the same amount of iron as is contained in an average human body.
We are living through the sixth mass extinction on planet earth - the last one was caused by an asteroid impacting the earth 66 million years ago - killing the dinosaurs ending the Mesozoic and making-way for the mammals. This time the asteroid is us.
AGGREGATE (detail)
7.ANTHRO-TEKTITES
Found objects, 3 x 20cm x 20cm, 2019
These fist-sized found objects have been brought to the gallery from Greendykes Bing in west Lothian- site of the worlds first oil-strike.
Due to the nutrient-deficient nature of the surrounding ecology and the immense violence and heat involved in the shale-oil extraction process, the sites can be re-imagined as the aftermath of a man-made volcanic eruption.
Since the industrial revolution humankind might be thought of as becoming ‘severed’ from nature. By exploiting energy from fossilised sunshine to drive internal combustion engines and manufacture fertilisers Humans surpassed earths seasonal temporalities and natural limits to growth and so in a sense became extra terrestrial i.e no longer ‘of the earth’. Seen in this way - these artefacts might be thought of as ‘tektites’ – i.e. the coagulated ejecta from a large asteroid impact – except in this case the impact is humankind
8. LIFELINE (PROMISE, RUIN AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS
AS A PRECARIOUS EXERCISE IN INDETERMINACY)
Assorted found objects, Salvaged from a Stadium demolition in Edinburgh, 2019
Any disturbance of this interdependent arrangement of found objects will result in a cascade of disturbance with unknowable consequences.
LIFELINE (detail)
LIFELINE (detail)
LIFELINE (detail)
9.TIME PIECE: THE (ETERNAL) PRESENT FROM ST AUGUSTINE
Copper, plaster, 2019
Thinking through making: an ongoing attempt to apprehend the cyclical nature of materiality and how oscillations of growth and decay manifest as a carnival of time passing through our perception, a continual entropic eruption of this eternal present.
MARK III : That Which Remains.
Mark III: That Which Remains” is a print, of the artists naked body held in the ‘survival’ or ‘recovery position’ – (in which one is placed when sick or unconscious and at risk of asphyxiation). Created by repeated laying down on steel coated in a reagent to speed up the rusting process leaving the impression of a figure laying prostrate and fossil-like In a darkened space.
Part mausoleum, part archaeological dig the steel, is illuminated by a single angle-poise lamp lamp - easily anthropomorphised and appearing perhaps as a member of some future civilisation examining the traces of what remains of this thing called man. Blood red with the same compounds used to create the oldest known cave paintings and redolent of an iron-pan layer of ferrous leachate in waterlogged soil or the toxic lasagne of black-carbon, plastics and radioactive particulates that signify the new geological epoch known as the “Anthropocene”, this haunting work is a reminder that whether we like it or not we are all collectively leaving a mark which will remain identifiable for millennia to come.
MARK III : That Which Remains.
