Tocsin Bang - solo show Union105 Gallery, Leeds

Recent work has centered on the bunkers and installations that were a part of my childhood in the militarized landscapes of East Anglia. Part of the 'everyday' of this childhood landscape were the hilltop observation posts of the Observer Corps. These installations were the underground concrete rooms for the Corps, occupied in split shifts for twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year between the late 1950's and 1992 and covering the UK in a consistent network. These hidden and enigmatic bunkers provide me with objects and material for drawing and are 'charged' places in my practice. They act as conceptual and physical 'laboratories' from where experiments into the subtle field of perceptions that form the work can emerge. They represent the centre of a sphere of observation, a place in which the world is reduced to the narrowest of perceptual apertures with which to regard the blinding flash on the edge of the horizon: a moment of the apocalyptic sublime. Each post had a total view of a landscape overlapping with that of the next post in its sector - within sight like the ancient systems of beacons (often sited on the same hilltops) to warn of invasion or disaster. The posts were abandoned in 1992 with the fall of the Iron Curtain. In some cases they have become flooded and in others a refuge for persons unknown, containing cooking stoves, enigmatic objects and empty cans. It is important to me that the posts contain a series of objects that are common to each one- objects such as warning siren crates, standard issue beds, intercom units, brushes, dustpans etc. The bathos of these objects is telling- they connect the occupants countrywide. Often what remains are the materials of cleaning, of washing of the body, reflecting the futility of these actions in the circumstances of mutually assured destruction. They represent a dissolution - or as Julia Kristevea puts it - “the abject .. edged with the sublime” ( Tocsin Bang- the codeword to be used by the Royal Observer Corps after a nuclear strike on the United Kingdom during the Cold War )