Using A Sprat To Catch A Mackerel

During October 2009, Daniel Kelly, Dmitri Galitzine and Ben Washington took up residency in our project space to create new work and to experiment with working collaboratively. The resulting exhibition, Using A Sprat To Catch A Mackerel launched appropriately with a mackerel barbeque and drinks and was open through November 2009.


Using A Sprat To Catch A Mackerel
By Ben Washington


Having spent what seems like rather a long time locked up together in an old police station Daniel Kelly, Dmitri Galitzine and Ben Washington present the fruits of their hard labour.

The show has its origins in a conversation we started over a year ago. We noticed certain similarities in our work: somewhat everyday, banal subject matter, crudeness in the choice of materials and a compulsiveness in each of our processes.

We decided to arrange a show with no clear agenda, the intention being to hold a more ambitious one in the future; throwing some bait into the waters to see if we could catch anything worthwhile.

Each of us brought our own specific concerns and worked upon them for a week in the space. Familiar things, the rain, rock gardens, tiny explosions. All of them re-worked and represented in a cruder form, with cruder materials; absurd in a way, trying to capture an atmosphere or an idea, but in doing so maybe giving back to the audience something of how we read the world.

The rain is something that hits you everyday, but visually it’s tricky to pin down. It exists as an idea and Kelly’s paintings are trying to represent that idea, rather than capture some sort of photo-realistic image. It’s asking you to suspend your disbelief and in doing so allow you to re-live all of the artist’s experiences of rainstorms.

Washington emphasises the frozen nature of an explosion. By composing the work in such a formal way it attempts to capture the point at which, in real explosions, the brain freezes, extending the moment, allowing you to consider all the elements in the visual field.

Galitzine saw a front garden in Devon, which for him captured the sculptural idiosyncrasies of a proud Saturday afternoon. By representing this moment as a life sized ornament or souvenir, he celebrates the absurdities of the modern era.

This is our sprat, we hope there will be a feast of mackerel to come.