NEW RUINS examines the melodrama of the ruinous, its relationship to nostalgia and what this reveals about the construction of personal or collective memory. Once part of a whole that no longer exists, ruins constitute structures, memories or ideas disembodied into fragments and inhabited by a persisting mood of loss or emptiness; a palpable presence of absence.
The exhibition suggests an expanded index of states of ruin, beyond the physically architectural. Distortions, glitches, slippage and deconstructed forms underpin a group of works that together mine degradation for meaning and unearth abandoned, forgotten or overlooked narratives. By assembling layers of matter on material, staining and scarification act as markers of passing time, triggering memories themselves constructed by the accumulation of experience.
In an increasingly immaterial world, ruins constitute traces of desolation, haunted not by ghosts of a distant past but apprehensive spectres from an uncertain future. These relics describe liminal nonspaces left open to re-imagination, re-construction and re-growth.