From the Breach

From the Breach is an exhibition of artworks developed during Dave?s doctoral research project, Stammers Echoes: A manifesto. This research concerned the philosophy of repetition in language, specifically the phenomenon of the stammer and the echo, and pursued the development of what was designated as linguistic materialism.

“It is familiar story, if it should even be termed that now. Myth and legend have been stricken with numerous attempts at definition in the past; Utopia, Erewhon, perhaps even Atlantis. But these retellings that use our own words, our own writing, fail to properly account for the actuality. It is perhaps some type of side effect or even a direct influence that manifests these slippages, incongruities and inconsistencies. Our inability to give it an accurate name meant it became easily misrepresented.

For those protagonists that are thrown and traumatised upon its shores, escape is nearly always inevitable. It has to be. Otherwise Language could not spread and infect more. It needs us as hosts. The purity of this event, perhaps as some type of exposure to an origin or source, manifests a contagious linguistic aesthetics which conceals a more profound condition. The futurity and displaced spatiality of hope and optimism that occurs at the surface is but an expression of the parasitic ontology of material Language.

Any charge to authentically report on such an incursion must be indirect. The inexorable failure and corruption of our own diluted and insufficient everyday language prescribes the rupture as not nameless but Unnameable. Attempts to approach and account the Void through which Language spews are always already tainted. Defensive structures j/ggedly pierce preconceptions. Flotsam flounders in c( )ncentric wa//s that obdurate observation. But using our limited speech and writing against itself, we can clutch at this territory or b( )rder and ^rray an ^rchipelago of ^rtefacts that are stained in Language.”