05 May 2011

True Wood - Neil Taylor at Campbell Works, London

True Wood, will showcase a significant new body of work including painting, printmaking and sculpture. This installation extends Taylor's interests in the curatorial interpretation of cultural artefacts, and the critical analysis of the social conditioning and assumption they bring to bare.

In a mighty green landscape a seed was saved from a juicy ripe fruit. The seed remained dormant and fertile until placed in a dead mans mouth, and in the fullness of the moment this seed quite naturally grew into a tree, which was latterly and laterally planked. Thick planks, like beams, True Wood.

This traditional story popularly regarded as historical but arguably unauthenticated runs the full course of time as we understand it; and provides for us, a link to the 'garden'. True Wood is thus the arbiter and mediator for legend.

For our next exhibition at Campbell Works, Neil Taylor explores the haptic resonance of True Wood by denoting the devotional fetishisation laid onto the legends surviving artifacts, these splinters becoming manifestations of a kind of sexualised desire in which gratification becomes linked by an abnormal degree to the veneration of a physical device. Likening this fervour to the behaviour and pilgrimages found within the contemporary art world, True Wood invites us to explore the question 'what do we want these objects to do for us'?

True Wood, will showcase a significant new body of work including painting, printmaking and sculpture. This installation extends Taylor's interests in the curatorial interpretation of cultural artefacts, and the critical analysis of the social conditioning and assumption they bring to bare.

The show will occupy all three galleries at Campbell Works, and be accompanied by a full colour 48 page, publication with commissioned texts by Glen Neath and Pascaline Monier.