Call Signs #6 was designed for the sound room at West Space and significant changes were made to the project in response to the gallery.
Call Signs is an exploration of imaginary space and each of the landscapes which form a part of it is an ideal location, often taken from dreams. Call Signs #6 is a travel fantasy. The format of Call Signs #5, which linked the landscape units together with wall drawing, seemed inappropriate to the materials of the West Space sound gallery which has an office-like feel.
Accordingly, I changed the materials and the installation that emerged was an improvisation in Chinese landscape painting composed of junk mail catalogues tied up in parcels. The parcels and draped wires took on the caligraphic quality of ink drawing. Chinese landscape painting has been a source I have been investigating loosely for some time as a format which could successfully combine the image and time/narrative elements of my work. Call Signs #6 used a 12th century painting by Zhang Zeduan entitled 'Life Along the River on the Eve of the Qingming Spring Festival', a scroll painting of extreme length which cannot be taken in as a single image but rather has to be 'read' from right to left as the narrative progresses along the course of the river from the tranquil countryside into the bustling heart of the city.
Call Signs combines a number of locations, some of them visual, some auditory and some simply implied. It's difining quality is probably the absent connectons between the different elements which the viewer is called on to supply so that the work is never a single whole but an experience that unfolds in time in the visitor's imagination.
