Tony Humbleyard
Poetic statements & Sculptural forms
My work engages with site and collaboration. exploring social, psychological and physical space. Unearthing the 'UseHistories' of place and how they inform the urgencies of now and our responses..
Exploring what it means to live an embedded relationship to place.I have lived and worked on the island of Unst since 2005 engaged in a process of Deep Listening. I work within walking, cycling distance of the Shorestation, inviting others into this ecology to collaborate, through ongoing projects and residencies.
i use random journeys, direct experience and the foraging of found objects. Constructing sculptures, interventions and poetic statements. Seeking out patterns and continuities, connections between internal and external geographies. Exploring the perceptual landscapes that frame our actions in the world, conjurng form and narrative.
‘Rock, fences, cloud and houses/ marks in a landscape/ looking for the continuities/ an alchemical gathering of found objects and direct experience/the space between thoughts/ liminal places/ dissident voices carried in the wind/ new ecologies ebb and flow….’
Abandoning guidebooks/maps/signs in favour of wandering/direct experience..The ‘found object’ offers an aesthetic of things imperfect and impermanent, sachng fa simplicity of form. Marked by time, eroded by the elements, artefacts of our past and present. In engaging with the past I don’t seek to romanticize it, but to see it as waymarker to possible futures.
Often my final sculptures arise from the relationship between different objects/materials, an intuitive process unfolding over many months and many journeys.
Reconnecting to natural rhythms, the tides, light and dark, rain and
sun. A practice that supports adaptation, resilience and wellbeing.
Realising a visceral quality of time, lost to us in minutes hours and
years. We move from linear time to cyclical time, an embodied
memory unfolding……
'At the edge we are caught in liminal space, the tension between what has gone before and what is to be..'
Elisabeth McCormack
