LES JOYNES

Drawing a Middle World

"In my work I examine entropy and formlessness creating on canvas red jungle-like settings or cave-like villages or offworld civilizations. I am interested in how the image can be subsumed by its surroundings where only fragments remain - a fractalization of image language. This reflects my interest in middleworld- places that are tense, full of curiosity and in between the recognizable and the almost-recognizable.

Derrida shows how writing acts as a pharmakon and threatens to blur the distinctions between good and evil, soul and body, invisible and visible: "This double participation, once again, does not mix together two previously separate elements; it refers back to a same that is not the identical, to the common element or medium of any possible dissociation" (Derrida, Dissemination, p130).

The pharmakon acts both as a bridge between two supposedly opposite elements, and as a subversive device erasing the distinction between the two elements it bridges to assume both their identities simultaneously. This creates a new space - a middleworld - an area that lies between definition.

I focus on images, objects and planes - spaces that are mid-bridge -that are somewhere between form/formless; construction/collapse; real/ unreal; artificial/ natural; growth-expansion/entropy.

As a way of tracking history and subject historicity I am exploring entropic spaces (abandoned towns, industrial sites, military installations, temples and burial sites) and formless places (underground caverns, caves) and my own painting and sculpture work which uses a process of reverse-excavation where I layer and remove and layer again.

History has always been an important area for my research - forgotten places, abandoned 1950s atomic-shelters, buried tombs in Egypt, and flora-covered sculptures and temples.

All of this was a picture of human inertia pushing forward and then suddenly releasing its grip on buildings and land with entropy, or nature’s inertia coming in to fill the vacuum. The result is a image of a middle ground – images, icons, remnants of human activity become echoes as the elements bombard human structures into the earth; what is left is half-buried and indeterminate and formless."