British art show 7: in the days of the comet

Exhibit: Karin Ruggaber’s wall-based Relief #90 presents an arrangement of tile-like forms resembling finds from an archaeological dig. Made from an amalgam of natural and man-made materials – shredded tree bark, concrete and plaster – each component part is cast using a process that produces unpredictable outcomes. Assembled on the wall, the individual parts engage with and activate empty space, while sometimes repeating, copying or mirroring each other. As Ruggaber comments, the work is ‘a kind of tableau, and in this sense it contains and plays with the elements of scenery, such as a focal point, background and foreground.’

Karin Ruggaber's Relief No 90 is an array of small painted sculptures, or sculpted paintings, each with its imprecise suggestion of a form – palettes, clogs, violins, crescent moons – hints from the real world and with the real world carried in their surfaces, from tree bark to pebble and moss. Dancing across the wall, they invoke small objects in rhythm and yet at the same time the turning world itself, the ground beneath one's feet; as beautifully ordered as the words in a sonnet.

The Curators write:

"British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet looks to art made in the period 2005–10, paying particular attention to the ways in which artists make use of histories – be they distant or proximate, longingly imagined or all too real – to illuminate our present moment. While current scientific theory posits that comets are nothing more than elliptically orbiting clumps of dust, ice and gas, utterly indifferent to our affairs, they remain powerful reminders of the way in which our species has attempted to understand experience through the measuring of time, the writing of history, the belief in cosmological influence, and the notion of a deterministic universe. The comet alludes here to the measuring of time, to historical recurrence, and – in the commonly counter-clockwise movements of these heavenly bodies around the sun – to pocket universes and parallel worlds. The comet is a sign mistaken for a wonder, be that cataclysm or rapture, and a figure of looping obsession. It is something that is always with us, no matter that it is sometimes far out of sight.

The subtitle of the seventh British Art Show is taken from H.G. Wells's 1906 novel In the Days of the Comet, set a century ago in 1910, the date of Halley's Comet's last-but-one apparition. The British socialist and science-fiction writer imagines the appearance of a comet over the United Kingdom, which releases a green gas that creates a ‘Great Change' in all mankind, turning it away from war and exploitation and towards rationalism and a heightened appreciation of beauty. Notably, this shift in understanding is achieved not through human agency, but through an ineffable alien force. What is significant about Wells's title, however, is that the ‘days' to which it refers are not only those of an enforced Utopian transformation, but the whole of recorded history. The comet's recurrent nature, and its orbiting of the same sun as the Earth, draws together the past, present and perhaps even the future too. Britain has always lived ‘in the days of the comet."

Lisa Le Feuvre & Tom Morton, 2010