ROVE was a group exhibition at Margaret Street School of art, Birmingham, June 15th until June 21st, 2015.

 

Text:

 

Come with me into the void

If you return one day

You who, like me dream,

Of that wonderful void, that absolute love

I know that together

Without needing to say a single word to each other

We will leap into the reality of that void

That awaits our love

The way I wait for you every day

Come with me into the void

 

-Yves Klein, Leap In to The Void, 1957

 

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Sometimes what we find beautiful is not immediately explicable. Beauty operates something like a promise– it is a suggestion of something, a half open door onto that which is just beyond our ability to explain it.

 

Why is it that the points at which the lines on the map cease, hold such sway over us? How can blank space be beautiful?

 

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Sigmund Freud’s study apparently swarmed with archaeological finds from his travels. The figurines and statuettes, displaced from their origins in Rome, became recollections of moments of the collector’s instinctive, seemingly irrational, urges. Selected primarily for personal, rather than monetary, value they were beautiful blank spaces that represented nothing more or less than the unconscious.

 

To collect the unconscious. To covet that known unknown. To discover glimmers of your deepest desires in far- flung places, to pluck them from the world’s grasp and to cherish them safe in the heart of your personal space. This is a faith of the explorer– the belief that, as we plunge new depths and journey out, we somehow stumble upon the familiar in unfamiliar places. In those parts that we cannot explain, we might find a sense of ourselves; a sense of home.

 

The lure of the blank is the lure of what is there all along. The mystery is here, sitting patiently in the middle of the room. All it is waiting for is that one unexpected encounter: that flashlight, which allows the beauty of the blank to shed its mundane disguise and reveal itself in the familiar and the everyday.

 

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To create is to travel. To piece together the metropolitan jigsaw of our lives by feel, by sight and by accidental connection. There, at the periphery of our imaginations, space is unfolding, rising and coming together in ways that could never be anticipated. To create is to collect blanks.

 

If we are careful we might bring them back– these little talismans of belief–and find that, beneath their glamour, they speak with the familiar voice of our day to day experiences.

 

It would seem after all that when we journey out, it is with the intention of coming back.

 

Come, you who, like us dream.