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 Unst since 2005 engaged in a process of Deep Listening and a sustainable Social Art practice. I mostly 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 gathering of found objects. Constructing sculptures, interventions and poetic statements. Seeking out the patterns and continuities, the connections between our internal and external geographies. Exploring the perceptual landscapes that frame our actions in the world. As experience becomes increasingly commodified, my work is a reclamation of being present in any given place. Using space itself  as an element that conjures form and narrative, a way of testing this present moment and our relationship to it.

‘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/ a quiet wisdom carried in the cadence of a stream…’

Abandoning guidebooks/maps/signs in favour of wandering/direct experiences.Exploring the visceral territory of our lived experience.The ‘found object’ offers an aesthetic of things imperfect and impermanent, a 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. 

Living and working in a geographically remote community (Unst Shetland Islands) I am interested in the possibilities of collaboration as a working process. For me it enables a deeper exploration of the work itself and the  possibilities that arise when other, hands, eyes, perceptions and skills are involved. I am especially interested in working across disciplines.

'At the edge we are caught in liminal space, the tension between what has gone before and what is to be..'

                                Elisabeth McCormack