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Audrey Reynolds - The Background That She Came From

Friday 9th Nov. 2007 12-3pm
Friday 16th Nov. 2007 12-3pm

Humans evolve twice – once at the business end of a bloated biological project, and again from infancy to maturity, developing first awareness, then power.
The child is required to twist bars of plasticine – curious invention of the Thoughtful Tooler - into a representation of some fragment of the world.
Lesson one: the world is big and great, and these lumpen shapes lack an equivalent nobility.
The universal reaction to this crushingly melancholic revelation is to disconsolately roll together all the different colours into one smooth ball. This action provides a further revelation: that infinite beauty has little or no regard for the hand it makes use of. Creativity is revealed in all its blind intransigence. In the light of this knowledge, the child regards the plasticine in its pristine factory form of neatly stacked extruded cylinder, and sees that no improvement can be made on its simple excellence.
There the path forks. The lesser travelled leads here: the balled-up infinity mode and the factory-smooth block mode, if made to heed each other, if forced into talks, might successfully produce a third way that both acknowledges the intransigence and escapes from it in small and unexpected ways.