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Indepth Arts News:
"Terry Setch, A Retrospective"
2001-03-04 until 2001-04-07
Royal West of England Academy
Bristol, ,
UK United Kingdom
Terry Setch is renowned for his observation and depiction of the pollution,
detritus, and rubbish which litters the beach near his studios in Cardiff
and Penarth. The subject of recent media programmes, Setch continues to
attract attention with his controversial, large scale works which often
include 'beach finds' embedded in the plastic and pigmented surfaces.
Setch's art has developed as a means of expressing his relationship with
the beach and his experience of it, in particular the processes of
metamorphosis which are evident in the landscape. Such changes may be sudden
and transient. For example, when rain or mist dissolve the view. Other
transformations in the landscape are more gradual: the result of opposed
elements in a continuous state of exchange. The beach is a place where land
and sea come together. Its appearance records the perpetual dialogue between
earth and water. The sea erodes the headland which spills its shattered
masses onto the beach. These mingle with man-made rubbish washed up by the
tide. All kinds of objects are visible: tangles of fishing line; plastic
bottles and bags; bits of furniture, clothing and carpet; fragments of
push-chairs and cookers; even rusting car bodies which have been pushed over
the edge of the headland. As a result of weathering these synthetic
intrusions in the landscape undergo an imperceptible but inevitable process
of transmutation. Simultaneously sand, rocks and detritus are bonded
together and fixed, repeatedly buried and unearthed, or constantly shifted
by the incessant tide.
Setch finds this conjunction of the synthetic and the natural, and the
transformation of one by the other, aesthetically and intellectually
stimulating. The implications of this attitude are complex. In one way Setch
sees amidst this chaos the formation of an alternative order predicated on
dissonance. He delights, for example, in the 'family of forms' which joins
objects thrown together randomly. At another extreme, the presence of
synthetic objects on the beach focuses, for Setch, the question of man's
relationship with the landscape and with nature in general. In this way,
such pollution manifests impending ecological disaster: the evidence of a
society at odds with its environment. Setch's art occupies the ground
between these poles.
Quote from the essay by Paul Moorhouse.
Terry Setch: New Work 1982-92
IMAGE:
Terry Setch
Internettide@: Global Warming 2000
top panel of 3;
top 1 x 3 m:
centre 0.9 m x 1.52 m;
bottom 1.52 x 0.9 m
computer generated ink jet print
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