clues

gary deirmendjian selected works

more particularly

The unity in the growing body of work lies strictly in the underlying intent born of this felt world view. I therefore ask of the viewer when making any assessment of the work as a whole, to relinquish expectations of a purely stylistic unity.

Aesthetically the work is concerned with creating a suggestive field of visual and physical experience, born of initial conceptual impulse. However it is realised through a process of making towards a certain tightness, in response to and directed by the sensibilities. It is somehow important not to take any conscious moral or ethical position, nor attempt to provide any remedy through the work.

On the more physical front I lean strongly towards scale, stillness, the out-of-door and the grounded. Material, formal and symbolic elements at play in any given work are reduced in number and aim at common readability. Materials and/or predetermined objects chosen for the works must satisfy the sensibilities, and through their actuality - of material, form, object-hood, characteristic attributes - contribute consistently to the work’s potential meanings as well as aesthetic resolution.

The potential of awe as an inherent working element in the work is always actively sought.

Such works take several months - in some cases, years - to realise and tend to be physically demanding. Each encounter with a work that has resulted completely out of individual effort, is akin to a sustained private performance that normally comes to rest at a point of exhaustion. The aftermath of any muscular discomfort and/or superficial cuts to the body attest in an important way to the body’s memory of the given episodic happening. The felt physicality in the making of the work is in its way a source of satisfaction and a small measure of having put oneself into the work. When the effort is more social - i.e. involving the skill and assistance of others - the making takes on a mastering flavour where one is at once engaged with an inner field of considerations but must also surface in order to externalise the work's overall direction.

What always proves exciting is the resistance and temptation of an unknown next step, where a leap must be taken, whether intellectual, aesthetic, artistic, physical, material and/or procedural.

	clues a few words
	in passing In essence my work concerns the individual and the tidal mechanisms of social conditioning that form and influence unquestioned attitudes and mass acceptance. It is in turn inspired by the ever enduring and conquering individual - of any time and place, who has come to see beyond their once assumed certainties. More broadly there is a firming in the understanding of our oneness as a single species and our extreme smallness in the context of a humming universe. Ultimately this is the sublime that fuels my work - our momentary existence on a grain of sand set adrift in boundless space. Once a believer I now rest my faith in uncertainty.
	more particularly The unity in the growing body of work lies strictly in the underlying intent born of this felt world view. I therefore ask of the viewer when making any assessment of the work as a whole, to relinquish expectations of a purely stylistic unity. Aesthetically the work is concerned with creating a suggestive field of visual and physical experience, born of initial conceptual impulse. However it is realised through a process of making towards a certain tightness, in response to and directed by the sensibilities. It is somehow important not to take any conscious moral or ethical position, nor attempt to provide any remedy through the work. On the more physical front I lean strongly towards scale, stillness, the out-of-door and the grounded. Material, formal and symbolic elements at play in any given work are reduced in number and aim at common readability. Materials and/or predetermined objects chosen for the works must satisfy the sensibilities, and through their actuality - of material, form, object-hood, characteristic attributes - contribute consistently to the work’s potential meanings as well as aesthetic resolution. The potential of awe as an inherent working element in the work is always actively sought. Such works take several months - in some cases, years - to realise and tend to be physically demanding. Each encounter with a work that has resulted completely out of individual effort, is akin to a sustained private performance that normally comes to rest at a point of exhaustion. The aftermath of any muscular discomfort and/or superficial cuts to the body attest in an important way to the body’s memory of the given episodic happening. The felt physicality in the making of the work is in its way a source of satisfaction and a small measure of having put oneself into the work. When the effort is more social - i.e. involving the skill and assistance of others - the making takes on a mastering flavour where one is at once engaged with an inner field of considerations but must also surface in order to externalise the work's overall direction. What always proves exciting is the resistance and temptation of an unknown next step, where a leap must be taken, whether intellectual, aesthetic, artistic, physical, material and/or procedural.
	sandstone and its significance Sandstone is a sedimentary stone. It is perhaps the most patient and humble of materials, consisting simply of sand particles bound by a little clay and compacted over an enormous span of time. In any significant hunk the sedimentary processes would have taken several hundred thousand, if not millions, of years to form. It is virtually an hourglass on a massive scale and how does the measure of one’s lifespan compare in the face of time itself? Having ground traces of organic and mineral inclusions entrapped within its frozen layers, sandstone may also be read as a time capsule. It is absorbent, unable to be polished, and yet is broadly expressive, responding to the slightest change in moisture and light. In sandstone all time is presented at once, clearly indicating that in all that while the grains - as a kind - have remained unchanged. Any discernible aesthetic variation between stones - even those quarried from the same bedrock - are due mostly to the highly localised circumstantial happenings during sedimentation that eventually characterise the clay matrix. That is, the muddy condition that hardens over time and under pressure, slowly fixing the attitude of individual grains. Here sandstone serves as an efficient metaphor for the story of human existence. Each grain of sand, in a matrix of trillions, may be read as a single human life - at once unique and of its kind. One may readily picture their existence as one such grain of sand with its attitude held and its particular grouping characterised by a social context. The stones presented here are all produced from quarried blocks and were largely shaped manually, using controlled rock splitting techniques. The stones in a life, lantern and chasm were purpose quarried - i.e. chosen and taken directly from the bedrock.
	muddy waters and its significance The mud used here is actual and is extracted from the ground in the immediate vicinity of the work’s making. It is not sorted and at the time of mixing is littered with inclusions, such as twigs, leaves, seeds, stones and insects. Once a certain aesthetic tightness is achieved the mud is fixed through the use of chemical bonding agents that slowly replace the moisture content and harden in time. Mud and sandstone may in fact be regarded as being the different material states of one another - pre and post sedimentation. The use of mud helps render the truth of the body as I see it - just another piece of organic debris. The mud encased figures here may also be viewed as individual grains of sand held by the mud of their condition, that are yet to harden into rock.
	the square and its significance The square shape features strongly in my work and is normally implied rather than actual. It is perhaps the most austere of the Euclidian shapes and one least connected to nature. In comparison the idea of a circle, oval or triangle are readily derivable from nature - i.e. the shape of the sun, eggs, or mountains respectively. The square is therefore a purer abstraction of the human mind and in the work it has come to represent the impositions of a purely rational world view.