Simon Withers

Disconnection - the relation of representation to the event re-presented
Folk Songs 1- 4

In the recent Folk Songs decoupages the air of unease is politically and historically referenced. Withers adopts this innocently playful hobby-craft medium, in an act of perverse apparent inappropriateness, to reproduce newspaper images of politically potent events.
Robert Clark mere jelly 2004


I have an interest in paper folding kits, whether a duplicate of Gaudi’s ‘Casa Milla’ or a down load of the ‘Twin Towers’ from the Internet, both examples remain unmade. The notion of making is more rewarding, more enticing than assembling and constructing; completion is not my interest. On my bookshelves, tucked away amongst the pages of printed books are examples of appealing cut out greetings cards, these utilise light and shadow to dramatise and sculpt the form. One the same bookshelves I have kept a few ‘pop up’ books from my own childhood. Each ‘Pop up’ is an embodiment of a theatre stage where a histrionic story is enacted.

A declared interest toward craft based materials and DIY hobby project kits give rise to subversive treatment or alteration at the very least. The initiation of an altered method of ‘Artisanship’ is a process of ‘self’ apprenticeship.’ The materials used in hobby sets permit deliberate experimental miss judgements. Injecting and responding to unexpected outcomes while working with craft materials is part of the humanity. An enhanced contemporary gravitas will have been in part stimulated from Folk Culture and Mythology. The work and the constituent of the nature of being are in part illuminated through myth. Arthurian legend for example utilises profound knowledge and esoteric wisdom to convey a story or a cosmic drama that also embodies symbolic messages.

‘Folk Songs’ is a series of four Decoupage works, carefully selected images from real life events that have been subject to exposure in the media. Originated from newspaper cuttings, I have taken out or drawn over the catastrophic event. I may have rubbed out the victim, up-ended the fallen and rendered some images back into a state of some normality. These are small, quiet and fragile paper works that are deliberately made un-sensational albeit the subject matter. The cameo works are ‘stage set’ in large extensive frames. These artworks in a sense weave an abject Faustian* chronicle, an expression and a construction of forms that haunt the past and the present. ‘For myth is the realm of the ambiguous.’(1) They are constructed from fragments of a reality that had no direct bearing on the self. Consequently, the Decline of definition of the ‘true’ language is re-constructed using and imposing an artifice, an impure self-presence that generates self-Illusion. In neurological terms this could be a profound delusion that is akin to form of collective Capgras Syndrome. What one observes is a phantom of the brain. This is no ‘Simon Pure.’(2)

Notes

* Faust. Sold his soul to the devil in return for 24 years of additional life during which time he could indulge in every pleasure and attain all knowledge at this command. Goethe transformed this necromancer into a personification of the struggle between the higher and lower natures of man.
(1) Christa Burger. Thinking Art, ICA 1991
(2) The Real Man, the authentic article.