£4.00 inc p&p

Lache pas la pataté and Pulp

The exhibition featured two of three installation works from Tom Hackett’s highly successful textual triptych tour in 2003 which took place at PM Gallery, London, UH Galleries Hatfield and, Rugby Art Gallery in 2003.

With lache pas la pataté the viewer is presented with a sweeping configuration of approximately seventy cast concrete open books. Each book has a hollowed recess on its opposite pages to suggest the idea of a hidden compartment. In the left recess of each book lies a cast resin potato form. Embedded inside each cast potato form is a short phrase collected from a different person from the Rugby locale. This eclectic mix of maxims, aphorisms, and truisms become the central core of the resin potato forms and the project.

With Pulp 200, medical drip bags are patterned in a rhythmic configuration along the long gallery wall. Each drip bag contains a pulped text or a piece of theory nominated by an invited contributor. Faced with a field of shredded texts held in the bags, with a dangling mass of capillary tubing, the viewer is presented with the opportunity to be fed by the pulp, the theories, opinions, thoughts, and narrative of others. In actuality, the final experience offers only the objects themselves and the Gallery: a space for viewer contemplation; that of the discursive and negotiated field between artwork and audience, amongst the inescapable schism between the written interpretative and the actual.
An essay by Steven Adams, the co-ordinator of critical and cultural studies at the University of Hertfordshire gives an account of the work and looks and the implications that the work has as a comment on the relationship between art and knowledge.
Published by text+work, TheGallery, The Arts Institute at Bournemouth 2004 (Now formally known as the Arts University Bournemouth)