Chip Foam
10 Oct - 14 Nov 2009
CHIP FOAM
George Henry Longly’s work consists in volumes. It extends beyond its formal components to mix with the air and alter the light. It is partly solid, partly optical, both concrete and immaterial, not altogether easy to quantify or contain. It enters into an environment affecting a temporary but total change. Immaterial volumes could be said to be both a product and by-product of the Industrial Revolution. The literature of Victorian England is filled with observations about the country’s air and atmosphere that serve to illustrate the new economy and its accompanying modes of production. Visiting London in 1824, Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle reported that he had seen a ‘black vapour brooding’ over Holborn, like ‘fluid ink’. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852) describes ‘a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes’ falling on neighbouring Lincolns Inn Fields. Further north, in Hard Times (partly set in a fictional version of the Lancashire mill-town of Preston) there were ‘interminable serpents of smoke’, a ‘black canal’ and ‘a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye’. Dickens described ‘Coketown’ as a place so deep within the haze of industry that it was known to exist only because ‘there could have been no such sulky blotch upon the prospect without a town’
In time, daylight would be so diminished that artificial sources would take the place of the sun. Yet the immaterial wastes of industry long preceded electricity and its commodities. Environmental debates began in 1661 with a pamphlet titled Fumifugium by the gunpowder heir John Evelyn. By 1884 the art-critic John Ruskin was giving dark prophecies for The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, a new phenomena of ‘plague-cloud’ dimming the light in the industrial cities of England.
Longly’s industrial aesthetics are far distanced from this age. The glossy surfaces, elegant lines and ornamental colour that appear in his work bear little trace of manufacture. His materials are determinedly inorganic, characterized by the kind of purity associated with 20th century laboratories rather than 19th century mills. Blocks of reconstituted chip foam or tablets made from plaster mixed with powder paints effect a confection of pastel shades. Patches of Artex or spray paint lacquers determine other synthetic textures and colours. Longly’s work reflects a modern, domestic sensibility. It gravitates toward the new, man-made materials and their implicit ideals.
According to the historian Lewis Mumford, the environmental conditions of the industrial economy dulled taste and blunted the senses. Pre-Raphaelite or Impressionist artists were accused of adopting an ‘unnatural’ and ‘inartistic’ palette. In the large ‘Paleotechnic’ towns, with their coal mines and steel plants, the air was thick with fossil fuels that tinned food was purchased when fresh produce was readily available. People were no longer sure of their ability to detect stale goods.
The estranged machine perfection in Longly’s work and its diffuse operations appear adapted to this course. His objects occupy the gallery space like random details from a science fiction, with quasi museological systems of display that seem to suggest their origin in another age. Elements of a composition are treated like a set of particles that remain together but subject to change. Solid materials are perforated or partially transparent; surfaces are looked at and looked through. There are shapes cut by light or marked out by shadow. A sculpture may be moulded from dust or coloured by an aerosol spray. Everything seems mobile, soluble, open to translation or displacement.
Longly’s work draws attention to the physical or chemical properties of things that find an otherwise common application in life, deactivating a default utilitarian approach to the modern environment and its components. His objects determine encounter with something that seems partly familiar, partly belonging to an indeterminate narrative. Together they appear like part of a code; relics or fragments of something almost lost.
George Henry Longly’s work consists in volumes. It extends beyond its formal components to mix with the air and alter the light. It is partly solid, partly optical, both concrete and immaterial, not altogether easy to quantify or contain. It enters into an environment affecting a temporary but total change. Immaterial volumes could be said to be both a product and by-product of the Industrial Revolution. The literature of Victorian England is filled with observations about the country’s air and atmosphere that serve to illustrate the new economy and its accompanying modes of production. Visiting London in 1824, Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle reported that he had seen a ‘black vapour brooding’ over Holborn, like ‘fluid ink’. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852) describes ‘a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes’ falling on neighbouring Lincolns Inn Fields. Further north, in Hard Times (partly set in a fictional version of the Lancashire mill-town of Preston) there were ‘interminable serpents of smoke’, a ‘black canal’ and ‘a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye’. Dickens described ‘Coketown’ as a place so deep within the haze of industry that it was known to exist only because ‘there could have been no such sulky blotch upon the prospect without a town’
In time, daylight would be so diminished that artificial sources would take the place of the sun. Yet the immaterial wastes of industry long preceded electricity and its commodities. Environmental debates began in 1661 with a pamphlet titled Fumifugium by the gunpowder heir John Evelyn. By 1884 the art-critic John Ruskin was giving dark prophecies for The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, a new phenomena of ‘plague-cloud’ dimming the light in the industrial cities of England.
Longly’s industrial aesthetics are far distanced from this age. The glossy surfaces, elegant lines and ornamental colour that appear in his work bear little trace of manufacture. His materials are determinedly inorganic, characterized by the kind of purity associated with 20th century laboratories rather than 19th century mills. Blocks of reconstituted chip foam or tablets made from plaster mixed with powder paints effect a confection of pastel shades. Patches of Artex or spray paint lacquers determine other synthetic textures and colours. Longly’s work reflects a modern, domestic sensibility. It gravitates toward the new, man-made materials and their implicit ideals.
According to the historian Lewis Mumford, the environmental conditions of the industrial economy dulled taste and blunted the senses. Pre-Raphaelite or Impressionist artists were accused of adopting an ‘unnatural’ and ‘inartistic’ palette. In the large ‘Paleotechnic’ towns, with their coal mines and steel plants, the air was thick with fossil fuels that tinned food was purchased when fresh produce was readily available. People were no longer sure of their ability to detect stale goods.
The estranged machine perfection in Longly’s work and its diffuse operations appear adapted to this course. His objects occupy the gallery space like random details from a science fiction, with quasi museological systems of display that seem to suggest their origin in another age. Elements of a composition are treated like a set of particles that remain together but subject to change. Solid materials are perforated or partially transparent; surfaces are looked at and looked through. There are shapes cut by light or marked out by shadow. A sculpture may be moulded from dust or coloured by an aerosol spray. Everything seems mobile, soluble, open to translation or displacement.
Longly’s work draws attention to the physical or chemical properties of things that find an otherwise common application in life, deactivating a default utilitarian approach to the modern environment and its components. His objects determine encounter with something that seems partly familiar, partly belonging to an indeterminate narrative. Together they appear like part of a code; relics or fragments of something almost lost.