Beneath the mundane

Having an empty weekend the wolf decides to try to fill it with a long walk in the sun and some Art. Plugging his head into the Yip-pod he sets off to the rather excellent Exchange Gallery in Penzance via Mousehole. If you knew where the wolf lives you'd realise how circuitous a route that is. And how much he has to think about.

Currently on display in the Exchange is Andy Currie's Turbulence, a title that has the wolf fighting not to make cheap jokes about a local Indian take-away. This is the second time he's seen the exhibition and he is as enthralled and intrigued as the first time.

Having no formal education in big first letter 'Art' has always pleased the wolf, knowing that his responses to what he sees are his own, and far outweighs the potential loss of nuance that a 'real' understanding of the cultural context of a work could bring. The wolf is arrogant enough to think that he has a cultural context of his own thank you, and analyses what he sees within that (and that of his friends and his son when they accompany him), in exactly the same way that he reads poetry; by making himself and his own experiences the measure of a work.

There are four pieces in the gallery, described as installations, but better and less pretentiously described in the wolf's opinion as kinetic sculptures. All are interesting but two absolutely entrance the wolf.

The first is called 28 Steel Rods, a set of fine steel bars, perhaps 4m long, hanging from what look like wiper motors and bent into shallow arcs by their contact with the floor below. The curvature of these arcs is constantly and rhythmically changed as tension is increased and released, snapping the bars into a random, infinite, yet constrained series of vertical compositions. These shapes provoke a strange nostalgia in the wolf and it takes him sometime to realise why.

In at least one of his previous lives the wolf was part-raised in a New Town, constructed in the 50's. The New Town centre in particular was decorated and detailed with sculpture, colour, murals and mosaics in the peculiarly resonant and optimistic abstract style associated with that decade. The wolf suspects that for most people within 10 years of his age range, 'old fashioned' chintz and Edwardian vernacular art provided much of the background detail of their early years. For the wolf, raised by commies, atheists and working class futurists in a town built to celebrate post-war optimism, abstraction, flat colour areas and the constructed relationship of surface and line remind him of a place he once thought of as home. And also trigger a sense of loss, of lost pasts and lost futures.

The second piece is called Dust Sheets and is in the picture above. It consists of seven plastic dust sheets coiling, tumbling and flexing above softly whirring domestic fans, and is wonderful. Again providing a glimpse of the infinite, bounded by the utterly mundane limits of its starting conditions (seven B&Q dust sheets, seven Argos fans), while every second revealing a new, beautiful, and transient form. The wolf is reminded of Blake's Auguries of Innocence (and incidentally one of his tattoos)

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

The wolf wonders at the dancing sheets, released from the search for pattern and meaning in his own life, at least for a while. There is something melancholy and something supra-natural about these forms, as if they are constantly attempting and constantly failing to describe something that is forever outside of human experience, unknowable: something powerful and mysterious. An inferred quantum level event of some kind perhaps, or the shadow (not the form) of a terrible angel's wings in motion. A disturbing and alien beauty.

Blake saw angels.
The wolf knows someone who once saw one too.
He wonders what they would make of this.
(strokes chin)

Time to walk back.