AFTERIMAGE

21/ 06/25 – 02/08/25

What compels an artist to venture into remote landscapes, to intervene quietly in forgotten spaces, or to orchestrate fleeting encounters that exist primarily through their photographic record? The works gathered in AFTERIMAGE. emerge from a questioning of permanence itself - a recognition that all forms, whether natural or constructed, exist in perpetual flux.

Works unfold in abandoned quarries where industry has left its mark, familiar places made strange through subtle mediation, and in natural environments where interventions reveal hidden narratives about our relationship with the world around us. This approach is rooted in a philosophy of gentle disruption - not the assertion of human dominance over nature, but rather a quiet negotiation of circumstances. In each work, there is a sensitivity to the material and historical textures of the chosen site, an awareness that every location carries within it the sediment of previous encounters.

The impulse to make such work stems from a reckoning with our current cultural and environmental condition - a time shaped by instability, blurred boundaries between the artificial and natural, and ongoing ecological crisis. They work with what they find - discarded plastic, biological material, dust, the very landscape itself - transforming materials that carry specific histories and geographies through delicate acts of recontextualisation.

Threaded through many of these works is a sensibility that embraces the absurdity of small gestures set against expansive backdrops. Whether through actions that teeter on the edge of futility, surreal inversions of logic, or quietly playful propositions, this lightness deepens rather than detracts. It softens the conceptual weight of the works, offering space for reflection that is as much felt as it is thought.

There is something quietly romantic in these gestures - small acts that recognise their own impermanence, yet insist on the value of bearing witness. Set against the scale of geological time, these tender endeavours find meaning in the attempt itself: a desire to make sense of our place in time and space.

Rather than lamenting what has been lost or attempting to preserve an idealised past, these works suggest new possibilities. They propose that meaning might be found in the everyday and the overlooked. A simple gesture - the arrangement of found objects, the carving of a single word, the burial of something impossibly small - becomes a way of bearing witness to the world's continual becoming.

It is through the camera's frame that scattered elements coalesce into new relationships, where the momentary becomes fixed, and where the trace of an action proves as significant as the action itself. These images function as both record and artwork, but crucially as reactivations - enabling the viewer to encounter a disappeared or transformed moment, extending the work's conceptual life beyond its physical form.

The sixteen artists embrace uncertainty and impermanence as creative forces, understanding that their actions will be undone by weather, time, and circumstance - yet finding profound meaning in this very contingency. Within Tremenheere's landscape, these situational propositions enter into dialogue with the garden's more permanent sculptural works, creating a conversation between form and gesture.

Ultimately, these practices suggest that meaningful engagement with the world begins with careful observation. In a time defined by environmental uncertainty and cultural upheaval, these quiet practices offer a different model - one that acknowledges our entanglement with the world while proposing new forms of care and attention.

AFTERIMAGE is curated by Alastair and Fleur Mackie as part of a summer programme of artist-curated shows at Tremenheere.

Alastair and Fleur Mackie -
Stack 2, 2024 | Stack 1, 2024