Moving on and Seeing Strange. Thinking About Matter and Bodies in John Newling's Site Works

Payne, Antonia (2002) Moving on and Seeing Strange. Thinking About Matter and Bodies in John Newling's Site Works. In: Currency and Belief: John Newling. Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, Yorkshire, UK, pp. 55-68. ISBN 1871480418

Abstract / Summary

Opening with reference to Newling’s interest in UK lottery machines (reflected in work in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park exhibition), the essay proposes that “for all the conceptual strength of Newling’s art, its meanings are ultimately inextricable from, and deeply engaged with, the processes of bodily experience of material forms in space”, and that “what renders this element of deep formalism so significant is the cultural and historical moment within which it is being sustained”. Payne then discusses in detail three site works produced between 1995 and 2000, placing them within a context of Newling’s longstanding preoccupations and concerns. She suggests that the artist’s engagement with site/place as ‘event’ is at the heart of his practice, which consistently addresses the embodied subject’s construction of meaning through negotiation of the world of material forms. Drawing in particular on the work of Edward S Casey, she concludes that Newling’s art can be characterised as an “ongoing exploration of human beings’ interaction with the material environments through which their bodies move and how, moment by moment, the events of those interactions construct their understanding and experience of an endlessly proliferating array of ‘places’.”

View Record (staff only)