Robert Partridge

Modern life, our contemporary social and cultural situation, can often be atopic - suspended in a bubble of non-aligned sensory dysfunction - life from inside our cars, from in front of the television, from the institutional. It can also be the same kind of feeling that one gets when leaving the cinema - all perception, all knowledge and experience realigned to a fiction in which the damp conditions outside, the long distance home and a general lack of recognition place us at odds with the 'real'. Now we are certainly conscious of realising only the surface in which the real is overlaid with reflections of its own making. What we need, at this point, is to trip up over a loose paving slab, bump into a sharp corner protruding from a darkened space, slip on a damp curbstone - to get back in touch - a shock - a lack of comfort - an unexpected zone in which to stumble onwards.