Tom Duggan
My work asks about the order, limits, constrictions and formats of what we are supposed to do, or what is supposed to happen. It frequently asks ‘What happens if…?’ assessing the assumed or the mundane in the possibility of finding new viewpoints.
I often use text within my practice and my artworks can exist as aggrandised statements elevated from conversation or monologue as a phrase spoken onto the gallery wall or can involve text within moving image. Once I painted I AM DISSATISFIED in large red and yellow letters high on a gallery wall in a fairground typography. It is intended that audiences may read further into this seemingly glib statement and consider it’s coming into existence. Its aesthetic appearance brings a double meaning to the words and associations are made with cultural phenomena. Through asking who these words belong to, why they have expressed themselves like this and in questioning why this speaker is dissatisfied, we begin to unravel the potential reasons for this elevation of phrase.
By reducing parts of language and interaction to basic elements and assessing them in relation to one another I draw upon inherent tensions and amplify them.
I made extensive use of DVD programming to create a moving image text work The House, which automatically generates a variety of narratives from an outlined selection of possible sentences. Implementing short sentences in white text on a black screen, violent and slapstick situations are silently described in a minimal and deadpan way. The narratives told in The House occur in an undetermined but logical order due to the programming written in to the DVD the piece plays from. It is seen, through this minimal provision of information that it is not the details of these episodes that my work is concerned with, but in how they function and interact with one another. My work attempts to ask, what are we left with when we remove all the detail?