In order to present the work an exhibition became the natural output, alongside Adrian Rowan and Alexandra Taylor on MA Photography we devised Primordial Soup: A Joint Exhibition. As a way to showcase the work we had produced so far and invite others in to the conversation, this exhibition was a natural step. With interactive pieces this output provided the necessary human interaction needed, allowing others to enter in to my research space to play and experiment as I have been doing. The three objects were placed on plinths across two rooms, giving space for each object to be viewed from all angles. Explored from all perspectives. The necessity for users to be able to get close to the objects dictated the layout, the objects are meant to be explored and scrutinised, they demand to be seen up close, touched, experienced. The placing of them on plinths formed a clear path around each object, and as such the rooms became as much a part of the object as the objects themselves. They became self contained spaces where the objects could exist, a parallel space where the beginning and end can intersect in the presentation of the human, the object and the in-between other once the human had been added back in. I sought for the rooms to have an eerie quality, akin to the feeling of discovery in a crystalline cave, to instil this sense of discovery in the user. Inspired by the use of diffused lighting in the display of Vinyl, Terror- & Horror by Camilla Sørensen and Greta Christensen at Röda Sten as part of the Reverberations exhibition, used here to focus you in on the horror in the sounds they were creating. From this the rooms were dark with careful ambient light to highlight the objects within, this worked to display how the materiality of the objects had a sheen and a fragility.

The concept for the exhibition derived from a biological theory to explain the origin of life on Earth, taken by us and re-interpreted as the primordial soup of ideas as the origin for our combined artistic practice. Isolated elements are added to the soup and combine until our art comes crawling onto the seashore and into your experiential space, out of the depths of our creative ocean.

Primordial Soup

noun

A solution rich in organic compounds in the primitive oceans of the earth, from which life is thought to have originated.

Here we presented the viewer with our soup; the atmosphere of our individual artistic practices, when exposed to the energy of the group, produced an exciting compound of our combined lines of enquiries through various spaces, forms, ideas, media. We accumulated these in our soup, concentrated at a location and within the rooms of the exhibition. The transformation of our individual practices into a unified whole gave birth to a new life.

Our Primordial Soup.