Sorcha Dallas

Jonathan Allen, Jesper Alvaer, Fabienne Audeoud, Tim Bailey, Jay Barsby, Mark and Steve Beasley, Dave Beech, Marc Camille, Chaimowicz, Eleanor Cherry, Martin Clark and Mark Dickenson, Henry Coleman, John Sell Cotman, Phil Coy, Kate Davis, Kaye Donachie, Rob Filby, Phil Gardner, Beth Groom, Richard Hughes, Christian Jankowski, Gunilla Klingberg, Thorsten Knaub, Jiri Kovanda, Friedrich Kunath, Simon Ling, Jan Mancuska, Andrea Mason, Simon Morris, David Musgrave, Rupert Norfolk, Oliva Plender, Elizabeth Price, Tristan |Reed, John Russell, Mathew Sawyer, Jan Serych, Neil Smallbone, clare Stephenson, Peter Suchin, Thomas Vanek, Emily Wardill, Elizabeth Wright, Toby Ziegler

‘The small propeller plane that services the route from Amsterdam to Norwich first climbed toward the sun before turning west. Spread out beneath us lay one of the most densely-populated regions in Europe, with endless terraces, sprawling satellites towns, business parks and shining glass houses which looked like large quadrangular ice floes drifting across this corner of the continent where not a patch is left to its own devices. Over the centuries the land had been regulated, cultivated and built on until the whole region was transformed into a geometric pattern. The roads, water channels and railway tracks ran in straight lines and gentle curves past fields and plantations, basins and reservoirs. Like beads on abucus designed to calculate infinity, cars glided along the lanes of the motorways, while the ships moving up and down river appeared as if they had been halted forever.’

W.G Sebald ‘The Rings of Saturn’

Like beads on an Abacus Designed to Calculate Infinity

Focusing on work made as a response to W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995) – a book which takes its cue from a walking tour of East Anglia – ‘Like Beads on an Abacus Designed to Calculate Infinity’ takes its starting point from the cultural, historical and geographic location of Sebald’s landscape. With the exhibition’s title a description of an infinite perception of space – of car lights on a busy road seen in the dark from an aircraft en route to Norwich from Amsterdam – the exhibition also references a parallel concern with recent tendencies in contemporary practice, be they archival, conceptual or expressionist in form. These practices, which cite a literary form of mental travel, also serve to introduce a contemporary idea of what the sublime might be.

Importantly, Sebald’s writing has the ability to take us in a number of directions at once, revealing hidden histories and unlikely coincidences, leaving us wondering how we arrived at various points through the complexity of his narrative. In a similar manner, the works in this exhibition, through their own intricacy, combine to form a labyrinthine structure that resists any easy route of interpretation.

The exhibition includes mostly new work by forty-three artists who have been chosen for their work’s ability to connect to the exhibition’s premise and other literary based concerns. The accompanying invitation leaflet contains the text work Walking; Things an Artist Needs by Andrea Mason. Te excessive form of listing in Mason’s project is mirrored in works which deal with time and duration, while a more formal approach is taken in drawings and paintings on paper by Rupert Norfolk, Clare Stephenson, Toby Ziegler, Simon Ling, Jan Serych and Kate Davis. Performance and documentation are referenced in the exhibition through works by Fabienne Audeous, Christian Jankowski, Jiri Kovanda and Phil Coy. A full itinery and contextual background to each work will appear within the exhibition.