Event Horizon (plural Event Horizons)
The gravitational sphere of a black hole within which the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light.
The furthest distance in the past from which signals from an event can reach an observer at later times.
(figuratively, by extension) A point of no return.
Event Horizons is a body of work which evolved out of research into the ways in which events can soldify into accepted mainstream historic cultural narratives - as well as how new technologies have continuously disupted and challenged this process. Along the way it became a more personal exploration of memory, trauma, time and changing technologies throughout my life.
My earliest vivid memory is of watching televised news footage of an enourmous twin-rotored Chinook landing during the 2001 Invasion of Afghanistan. I remember how impossible the machine looked, how much it frightened me. I remember the texture of my Mum’s jeans as I clung to her leg, and the rippling lines of the CRT television the news was broadcast on; it’s high-pitched mosquto whine. After the T.V. was turned off my brother and I would stroke the black screen, feeling the invisible fur of it’s static afterglow.
Each of the Event Horizon pieces represents a year of my early life; reflecting the historical events, social narratives, emergent technologies and (most importantly) the media spectacles that unfolded around me as I grew up. My childhood coincided with the beginning of 24/7 news cycles, the advent of true global data networks and the end of the utopian ideals of Web 1.0. My earliest memories, personality and identity coagulated in this flux environment, with these technological shifts (and the narratives that were amplified through them) affecting and disrupting everything around me.
These pieces act as an indirect, personal reflection on the sense of dislocation and alienation that I felt during (and still feel looking back on) my childhood. The wars and conflicts, the scientific breakthroughs, the dominant pop culture, the animals that went extinct. I created a tattoo-like technique for engraving and inking 19th century ceramic that references the historic craft of scrimshaw as an oblique reference to the social history of Liverpool, where I grew up. I wanted to make something like an OOPArt to capture the sense of strange fragmentation and incompleteness that comes from grappling with/being shaped by such incomprehisbly large and complex systems. The Event Horizons have been shown individually or in groups in several exhibitions.
