Alec Shepley | Sometimes doing nothing leads to something

 Alec Shepley | Sometimes doing nothing leads to something

Opening 4th October | 6pm-9pm Then open until 24th October.

Alec Shepley exhibits drawings and small sculptural works, photographic documentation and video pieces that are iterations of walks and ‘sweeps’ from the past five years. He focuses on drawing as action, as a spatial practice – a means of encounter – using walking and cleaning as methods to engage with us. He sees the process as ‘the work’ and the objects and images on display as documents, or by-products of this process of journeying and engagement.

Artist Statement: Before I start ‘work’ for the day, I often do nothing - tidy up my workspace or go for a walk. This occupation is often seen as procrastination, non-productive, lacking in purpose. For me though, it is the opposite of that as it provides me a way into creativity, a way of accessing new possibilities, transitioning to new spaces, new potentials. Purposeless moments have become something purposeful, something visibly tangible, and I have co-opted the act of walking and cleaning and incorporated them into my art practice in the form of contouring – literally taking a line for a walk – wherever it leads. Dérives or ambulatory practices are nothing new, Baudelaire talks about the flâneur in his 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ as a ‘passionate spectator’ immersed in the fleeting, ephemeral experience of urban life.

In this exhibition I am bringing together recent works which document the space of a walk, sweep or a clean, particularly of those less-well trodden paths, places of neglect, cracks in the architecture, hinterlands etc., as modest gestures which remark on the unremarkable, the pedestrian and the overlooked. To paraphrase Heidegger, drifting here and there in those potential gaps in the ‘busy-ness’ our everyday life, like the space of a queue at the check-out for example, reveals something about our very being as a whole. There is a vast expanse that boredom makes available - if only we would let it.

alecshepley.com