lydia unsworth 

the specifics

My work is a rebellion against time, an attempt to retain what time cannot help but destroy, if only for a short while. The preservation of fleeting seconds highlights their absence, the stillness and silence of thoughts and moments alludes to their transience and the impossibility of truly retaining anything.

I consider my work to be an ongoing attempt to highlight the strangeness and wonder of being: simple objects become complicated, the mundane provokes awe, and it becomes impossible to understand the everyday and overlooked. There is an enormous distance that will always exist between our mental selves and the physical presence of the world around us. We will never be able to penetrate this mass and so its otherness will never cease to amaze us – everything becomes important.

Life is an unremitting series of ordinary events and it is this ordinariness that fascinates me – the irrelevant, the nothing, the substance of our day-to-day lives.

My materials are modest and clumsy; they ask for nothing, they present themselves openly and honestly. I don’t want things to be neat, I want them to be old and used and lived with. I want to provoke curiosity in the banal and the trivial. I want to state the obvious until it ceases to be obvious.

My work consists of simple gestures and fleeting ideas, like half-thoughts hovering unspoken in the air – thoughts that appear to provoke other thoughts, thoughts that seem to be abandoned half-finished, thoughts that suggest absence. The idea that ‘nothing’ is a possibility is hinted at, that ‘nothing’ exists, or more accurately, that ‘something’, at some point, could no longer exist.

the fascination of repetition

the noise of feet descending a staircase. the ritual of drinking a cup of tea. the noise certain packaging makes when it is opened. the air trapped inside a bag of crisps. the feel of a biro making contact with the first page of a new notebook. the indent the pen makes on the top sheet as it presses down on the bed of pages beneath. the beauty of bed, the complete comfort of covers in the morning. the absolute perfectness of the noise of certain seconds of certain songs at certain times. listening to a favourite album through earphones in a public place. the joy of travelling on buses, of being driven, of sitting still and moving at the same time, of watchng the outside pass. the strange happiness of crying. the act of touching an object, using it and of returning it to where it belongs. the fact that we give objects places to belong. the enjoyment of having a shower. looking at things i have looked at hundreds of times before. the perfect outline of shadows. the anticipation of opening a new packet of photographs. eating and tasting. a new pint of ale or a food not tried before - when eating and tasting force their way to the forefront of consciousness. falling asleep in the afternoon. the smell of the air sometimes. certain smells that evoke abstract memories whose presence can only be felt as a kind of vague nostalgia or yearning. waiting until the last moment to piss. the knowledge that a favourite item of clothing is nearly dry after a period of absence in the wash. believing a dream is real for a time and feeling each and every thing as if it were actually happening. the first mouthful of water on a hungover morning. the noise things make when i touch them, the flick of a switch, the click of a button, the zip of a zip. walking from one place to another. the endless variations in the colours of the sky. the fluidity of typing and not hitting a wrong key. long journeys on motorways that all look alike. movements made so often they no longer require thought. automatic doors. the way clothes become yours over time. the way people pronounce words. the perfect line of a pint of guiness. the point where land and water meet. the knowledge that all feelings eventually end. doing nothing sometimes. the fact that i am here and that things happen and will continue to happen.

through a sheet of glass

There is forever a barrier between myself and the world. There is permanently an immoveable obstacle seperating my being from the land of external things. The window represents this distance, the distance that lies between the world and people. The sheet of glass does not change the construct of the world in any way or alter any aspects of its physical appearance, however it can still be seen as an object and as an obstruction needing to be negotiated. Always before our eyes, invisible yet solid. Both 'seen through' and 'seen'. All the world is viewed as though through a pane of glass, untouchable, unpenetrable.
We can never be at one with existence, we shall remain one step removed from the earth. There is our self and our experiences... and then there is everything else. Nothing in or about the world can ever truly be understood. We live in the solipsism or our individual minds and, to me, the sheet of glass is the visual description of how everything else is outside of us and of how we are outside everything else.
The rain on the window pane emphasises the existence of the glass within the image. Transparent substance upon transparent substance. The glass is seen, it can be touched from both sides but never ignored.
This image attempts to be a chronicle of the experience of living.
The rain also is a temporal thing. It is melancholy yet it is cleansing. It is grey and dull and wet but soon it is over and everything is new. The rain is change and the transient, maybe the rain is each of our individual existences while the glass remains immutable.. at least as far as the rain and all foreseeable rain is concerned. Although of course even this changeless, enduring glass will eventually melt away...

There is always a distance - always a not understanding - always a looking harder and never finding anything. Everything eludes me.