Claude Heath

OUT OF SIGHT BUT NOT OUT OF MIND   

Do we use our vision to reach out to touch objects? This is a thought that has engaged many thinkers who have struggled with the idea of perception. Descartes compared sight to a blind mans stick. It appears that so much of what we see is an illusion. Shapes are translated into real objects by our imagination. Sensation too, often confirms what we already believe we feel.

Claude heath's work exposes our preconceptions for what they are and questions the relationship between the world of sensation and ourselves.

Do we feel what we see or do we see what we feel?

Wearing a mask over his eyes the artist has has made drawings by making marks with one hand while the other feeling his way over a life mask of a face. The resulting drawings are a trace of a journey of sensation and a search for form with out sight. For the period of the making of the making of the drawing he cannot see the cast of the head or the results of his mark making. At this stage he can not make any aesthetic judgements and only follows his imagining through sensations. At this point in the process he is literally feeling his way through the equivalent of "physical vision".

With this exhibition he has taken the work a stage further by enlarging two drawings and re-drawing them directly onto the wall of the gallery. This deliberately has the effect of exteriorising two two principally private acts, which is the historical nature of drawing and touching. By amplifying the awareness of sensation from its normal volume, so to speak, we question much of what we have previously taken for granted. The wall drawings become the visual equivalent of a tactile sensation, rather than that of the normal audio one.

Heath's drawings ask us to question our perceptions while viewing the results of his process of working. We have the opportunity to to piece things together in different ways; sensations of vision or visions of sensations. The wall drawings move between being the subject and the object of the artists and our imagination.

The life mask from which the drawings were made is placed on the wall as part of the installation, which also provides the opportunity for the visitor to test their own perceptions by having the opportunity to touch with their eyes closed or open.

Barry Barker.

Text for Hales Gallery, 1995.

 

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