Rowan Richardson: Artist Statement

Finders, Keepers

Is the glass half empty or half full? When using this commonly used idiom we associate our perception of a glass of liquid as an echo of our attitude, be it positive or negative. Why is the man who acknowledges the glass as half empty the pessimist? What we find in a glass half full is what we are given, what we find in a glass half empty is what we give it. The glass half full is fixed. The glass half empty is transitory. When the philosopher Heidegger talks about a jug he says it’s the empty bit inside that we like, that's the bit that is useful to us; the emptiness is meaningful. Scientists can describe the clay vessel but not the absence. My work seeks to describe the absence and what we find in it.

For ‘A Matter of Process’ I have chosen to show a short film that explores how the act of viewing lost photographs of strangers opens up a creative space where we find our own concerns. During the process of making I ironically lost footage for the film. If 1‘most things become more interesting when we’ve lost them', then the interest in my misfortune was the way losing all my footage shifted my own perception of the work. Each viewer’s perception of the same thing can differ due to their own experiences.

Through my involvement in the curation of ‘A Matter of Process’, in particular my role in advertising the event, I became intrigued by the concept of notice boards: the way they bring attention to all types of information, both formal and informal, their layering, composition and their expiry. Notice boards are living archives. I chose to project my film onto the notice board to bring attention to the information that we choose to find in the layers of lost and expired images. The notice board is painted yellow to acknowledge my involvement in 2 A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE which became the background of my work; encouraging me to hold back from painting and become critically engaged with new creative approaches, like installation, sound and film.

1 Leader, D, 2002.Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing, UK: Faber and Faber
2 http://www.exhibitions.dundee.ac.uk/acut.html