Burgeon: James Rogers

It is a different tissue from the exploited steel that the sculpture is wrought from. The connect between shape and space is complete not just by welding, but in a relational and material light. A sense of the body discovering itself in a ‘situation’, stilled in a racing moment in which intelligibility requires integrating object and other. If it’s a unity, it is not a picture to be looked at, rather the outcome of attention. A neural path specific to itself. A model? A representation? If so, not one for reference but one created as a stand-in, a make-do in an unfolding predicament.

In Rogers’ words, the ‘situation’ arrives with pipe, steel pipe. 'Pipe is nature. Cut pipe embodies equivalence. Strip pipe has our insides and outsides exposed simultaneously. Time is unwound.’ With the grisly business of flensing concluded, the idea is revealed in stark clarity, the seed of continuity is sown. The hot blooded engagement in the hunt for air and space ensues. Minutes turn into hours turn into days and sometimes months.

‘You have nothing. No effort rewards try what you may. Nothing new added. Despite yourself, there comes an invisible last intention. The notification comes through, the buckle in time. Space has arrived. You took a second look at tomorrow. Put down the tool.’

In the words of Chinese philosopher Chang Tzu,...’words are like waves acted on by the wind’. An appropriate metaphor for an artist who’s pre-occupations with nature dwells mostly one hundred metres either side of the shore line. A paradoxical conflict exists here in the ceaseless cycle of the tides and the stoic journeyman’s investment in stilled, expansive matter. But this is the pact, the cycle of finding substance and moving on. The imprint of the past and the possibilities of a future, mediated in a solely material state for a present and human grace.

The outcomes here, accumulated over the recent years, cohere from the affiliation to a personal process. The ‘plastic’ phenomenon of metal work unearths structures that explicitly focus the effort of making, until the turbulence of reckoning is spent of energy. If the sculpture survives the scrutiny of the harsh light of day, you breathe the shared air of co-existence."