the_Ned_James
The Dark Ages
New series of work working with re-enactment groups
image credit: Wall Street (1987) 20th Centry Fox
Abstraction has a long history of being tidied up and consumed by conservative collections. The radical made tasteful, collectible and safely unrepresentative, devoid of time, place and politics
The work plays with the slightly ridiculous expectation that a painting should sit quietly on a wall and behave itself. Instead, 4 boro’s gives it four competing accompaniments audio and framing, and lets the viewer decide which one to believe, if any.
The audio is deliberately separate from the object. There is no single authoritative explanation of the painting, no tidy key to unlock it, and no guarantee that the people speaking have agreed on what they are looking at. The headphones turn the encounter into something more private and slightly absurd: you stand in front of a tiny painting while someone else tells you what might, or might not, be going on.
The scale of the painting is part of the joke. It is small enough to require you to get close, while the audio potentially pulls your attention somewhere else entirely. The work becomes less about looking at a painting and more about negotiating between looking, listening and being told what you are looking at.
4 boro’s is therefore one work, four interruptions, and an invitation to make your own mess of it.
The title of the work comes from a short film by Geoff Marshall and Viki Pipe for Londonist.com in 2015 https://londonist.com/2015/09/video-four-boroughs where Geoff walks between 4 London Bouroughs in under 30 seconds.
Artist Credits / Biography and links to follow shortly;
Nell Catchpole
Info to follow...
Dean Kenning
Info to follow...
Aled Simons, Bláithín Mac Donnell, Tom Cardew.
Audio from: Preserving Hole (2025) Division of Labour
Synopsis: Preserving Hole - A meteorite, a spoil tip, a mountain or an island. A fatberg. A co-authored story entangling fact, fiction and anecdotal prose. Three voices become one narrator, Celtic myth, folktales, traditions and superstitions are merged, layered and retold. A hole or a bog, subterranean preservation - like a time capsule in a biscuit tin with a dodgy lid, buried forty years ago but the water got in. What happens when fact becomes anecdote?
From the Division of Labour exhibition of audio, a breathing sculpture and textiles.
Preserving Hole is the culmination of a six-month conversational collaboration between Welsh artists Tom Cardew, Aled Simons and Irish artist Bláithín Mac Donnell. Emerging from research sharing and an exploration of practice intersections; individual interests are fused in tangential storytelling, narrative building and myth making. Unearthing spurious information and hearsay to present loose-narrative audio and sculptural installation, drawing on collective Celtic nation backgrounds. This project is a direct result of exchanges facilitated by the Four Nations International Fund.
Written by Aled Simons, Bláithín Mac Donnell and Tom Cardew. Read by Timothy John, sound design and edit by Aled Simons.
Artist biographies:
Bláithín Mac Donnell is an Irish artist who explores how we share and retell stories through performance, text, collage and sound. Concerned with the entanglement between rural and digital infrastructures, her work seeks to attend to a sense of place by meshing the past, present and future. Currently a PhD researcher at NCAD, Dublin her practice based research explores the dissemination of the performed voice. Bláithín holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, 2015 and a BA from Goldsmiths, London, 2012.
Tom Cardew is a Welsh artist and writer. His practice explores tacit societal structures of competitive and comparative worth, meditating upon the markers, myths, superstitions and materials that shape them. His work often examines ideas of authenticity and memory within the digital; atmospheres and social scaffolds formed through transactional, value-based exchange, and of digital, para-social relations. He was Fluxus Arts Projects Laureate at Frac Bretagne and Domaine de Kerguéhennec and had a solo exhibition at Oriel Davies in 2024. He is currently working on a series of permanent public sculptures supported by Studio Response (2025).
Aled Simons studied, lives and works in Swansea, South Wales. The core of Simons’ practice explores pseudo-science, sham-ritual, anecdote, class and humour; found objects, crude sculpture, video, performance and writing. He often employs looping or repetition - the ubiquitous gif or meme format. Early 1990s television and its specific place at the junction of a shift between analogue broadcast and digital on-demand viewing. Inverted values - re-interpreting or misunderstanding the idea of an heirloom. Operating in the space between the tension release of a laugh and the awkwardness of things that go on too long or fall flat and fail. Recent exhibitions include: Poor Things, Fruitmarket Edinburgh, Killing TV, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, Unchorus, Freelands Foundation, London and Soft Split the Stone, g39, Cardiff.