Rob Sherwood
Monday, 29 October 2012
Work from The Warp & The Weft, ongoing at Son Gallery.
“Rob Sherwood’s exhibition The Warp & The Weft presents a cycle of works which create unexpected, sensory experiences out of systematic processes. These are often informed by abstractions found or created whilst using digital media and communications: unnecessary disruptions in otherwise logical and functional environments. The installation involves painting, paper making, sound, video and photography: each media and process being defined by its unique but corresponding system and their different ways of reacting under the artist’s hand, and interacting with one another.
In Sherwood’s paintings the grid is the underlying structure. He is interested in its role in processing digital light: particularly the organisation of colour into separate entities and the illusion of their togetherness, as made evident by pixellation. The grid is apparent in both Screen No.1, a folding screen that follows a painted algorithmic pattern, and in a video work exploring the colour palettes on painting software.
Elsewhere a sound piece finds harmonies within the falterings of a streamed mp3 file, whilst a photo diptych forces images arbitrarily sourced from the internet into new relationships. Hanging on a panel is a piece of paper: handmade using the pulp of Japanese knotweed, an invasive plant known for its complex, rhizomatic root structures.
As with his grid paintings each of these works tampers with an apparently rigid system and finds creative space in a subjective interference. The suggestion is that models which appear strict or sterile can combine meaningfully with subjective fields of feeling, whether in the algorithms of the internet or those of a painted pattern.” – Son Gallery