Brian Graham

Seen by Scene. First in Line 2010
Mixed media on board 50 x 71 cm

In recent years I have visited many places of considerable interest to me. They varied in personality from sites trapped within a background of industrial squalor to sublime spectacular terrain. They all shared an essential ingredient. All contained compelling evidence of early human occupation.

Some of this evidence was minimal; a rare fragment of bone or an isolated shard of knapped flint. On other occasions, whole living floors have been revealed, offering a more comprehensive overview of life in Britain from around 950,000 years ago.
           
When released from its guardian terrain, this precious, sometimes barely recognisable material, often finds itself in the laboratories of museums and universities, becoming the recipient of considerable analysis. After that the most significant may find favour with curatorial staff.
           
As I observed in the catalogue for my previous exhibition NOW AND THEN, I am interested in how early technologies, their original purpose now long redundant, have transferred their allegiance to new resting places; cool, clinical and analytical.
           
I decided in SEEN  BY SCENE, a new body of ten paintings, all diptychs, to examine these relationships further. In essence I have looked in even greater depth at these arenas of presentation as exemplified in some of modern architecture’s most acknowledged buildings. Here, material could be ideally SEEN alongside the SCENE of its original location.
           
All titles in SEEN  BY SCENE have explanatory sub headers that refer to issues explored that are as relevant today as they were to our distant antecedents and in some cases pertinent to my personal experience. At this point some readers may appreciate a little guidance, to help understand my thinking, when constructing some of these works.

For example, in ESPAÑA, the raised and incised forms used to express Frank Gehry’s lyrical Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, are linked to bone fragments found at Atapuerca, a hugely significant early human site also in Northern Spain, which I visited in 2005.
           
In ARCHITECTURE, the circular white aerial form of Richard Rogers’ 02 Arena is placed alongside a similarly shaped scatter of materials that would have accumulated over time as concentrations of discarded detritus. When I made this work I had read that assemblages of bones and stones from 400,000 years ago at a waterside site could be considered as some of the first attempts at architecture. Now it is thought these accumulations were formed by the natural movement of flowing water. Even so, in early sites of human occupation it certainly would have been wiser to gather around hearths and be near to a fresh water supply.
           
With THAMES, Herzog and de Meuron’s inspired reworking of Bankside Power Station, now Tate Modern, looks towards the capital’s river, where in gravel deposits at nearby Swanscombe, the oldest cranium yet discovered in Britain, is probably that of a young woman.
           
Looking at WAR, Daniel Libeskind’s probing deliberately uncomfortable forms that constitute Manchester’s Imperial War Museum, reflect the Clacton spear, at around 400,000 years old, easily the earliest wooden artefact ever found in Britain.
           
My quest for some fulfilment as an artist means, as just revealed, that I have to try and deal with the exhilaration of new ideas as they present themselves to me. Running parallel to these requirements is another need; to make paintings within a well understood landscape tradition on canvas or paper; small, medium and large.

                                                                                       Brian Graham. November 2011