Seed

Seed brings together three video works by Martin Westwood: A Seed is a Stone Until it is Sown (2011), Re-cut Piece (working title) (2016), and (S.F.M.) 1639 — 1733-34 (S.B.) (2025). Though distinct in their formal qualities, the works share concerns with value and authenticity articulated through gestures and motifs that intensify materialities and that mediate exchanges between object and document, labour and image, sound and action.

In A Seed is a Stone Until it is Sown, coins function as counters in a game of solitaire. These objects simultaneously tokens and ‘the real thing’ - are initiated into a system of reserves, circulation and disposal. Re-cut Piece (working title) extends this inquiry into the relationship between photographic documentation and live performance—or, the reserves of experience and the circulation of the mediated image. Documentary photography of audience members in an iconic performance work is taken as the initial motif to display the activity of kneading dough into photocopier carbon and microphone windshields. This labour is interrupted by multiple video clips of Black Rod performing their annual role of ceremonially opening the British Parliament.

Both A Seed.. and Recut.. explore how acts of exchange, whether economic or symbolic, reveal tensions between the tangible, the transmissible and the understanding that objects persist through their continual re-enactment. Each work employs video as a solution to capturing motifs and gestures that elude pictorial or sculptural modes of practice, avoiding live performance as an outcome that inadequately framed the motifs and truncated their circulation/mediation. These “perverse aggregates” emerge to become sites of negotiation between mobile and immobile agencies.(S.F.M.) 1639 — 1733-34 (S.B.) advances these ideas toward a proposed image of “ur-economy” - a prototype of exchange preceding the division of economy into spheres of commodity, language, and body. The work’s hour-long anamorphically corrected footage conflates specific details from two canonical paintings: soap bubbles are blown through a print of the friction hole upon Saint Francis’ habit. Here, animation arises from the shifting intervals and rhythms between repeated recordings of the bubbles’ paths and the continual micro-edits to the friction hole. This shift, between the still and the moving image, evokes accumulation and expenditure, appropriation and gift, as the work’s progression advances and recedes.

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