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The Night and the First Sculpture
The Night and the First Sculpture
Available now: First Edition (200)
Available now: Special Edition (20 +2APs)
The Night and the First Sculpture (2024) is Alexander Mourant’s first publication, containing sculptures, performances and photographs, made on his family farm. Responding, firstly, to Robert Smithson’s Island of Broken Glass (1969/1970), the work evolved through playful, material-led exploration, to question the metaphysical nature of images and concepts of time, space and place.
Made under the cover of night, Mourant’s process was one of metaphorically imbuing and assembling agricultural materials – glass, wood and stone – in an attempt to materialise his own theories, often referencing novels, non-fiction, autobiography and mythologies. As Alan Huck writes, “The approach that Mourant takes is not unlike what Wordsworth proclaimed was the task of the poet – to build up the greatest things from the least suggestions.”
In this work, the artist’s ad hoc farm-studio performs, becoming a stage or a theatre for the conjuring of images. This ‘black box’ hints at the origins of photography and the camera as architecture; one seemingly infinite, with a void-like substance and hard to define scale. Here, the night transforms into a character, encapsulating desire, the unknown and the artist’s pursuit of knowledge.
At its heart, The Night and the First Sculpture proposes how images and stories may form, erode and reshape themselves over time. Mourant continues to draw upon research into Conceptualism’s cognate movements – Land Art, Arte Povera and Mono-ha – to help expand or ‘push’ our understanding of the image world.
The Night and the First Sculpture includes an essay by Alan Huck, and an in conversation with Eugenie Shinkle and Alexander Mourant.
Published by Folium, 2024.
Supported by ArtHouse Jersey
First Edition of 200
176mm x 225mm
96 pages
Section sewn
Hardback
The Night Is the First Sculpture, 2021/2024
The Night, warehouse door, steel
Dimensions variable
Ships That Pass in the Night (I-X), 2021/2024
Wood, glass, organic matter, granite, screws
50 x 100 x 60cm
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Train Carriages (Stationary), 2021/2024
Wood, glass, organic matter
7 x 51 x 244cm
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Train Carriages (Oscillating), 2021/2024
Wood, glass, organic matter
7 x 51 x 244cm
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Evidence of a Failed Marriage (I), 2021/2024
Photo-series of 3 archival giclée prints
Dimensions variable
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Evidence of a Failed Marriage (II), 2021/2024
Photo-series of 3 archival giclée prints
Dimensions variable
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Evidence of a Failed Marriage (III), 2021/2024
Photo-series of 3 archival giclée prints
Dimensions variable
A Week at the Seaside with You, 2021/2024
Archival giclée print
Dimensions variable
A Place Possesses Me, 2021/2024
Photo-series of 46 archival giclée prints
Dimensions variable
Perception and the Potential of Knowing, 2021/2024
Photo-series of 10 archival giclée prints
Dimensions variable
Waves and a Stone on the Shore, 2021/2024
Wood, glass, organic matter, granite, screws
18 x 320 x 60cm
A Fin Cut the Green Glass of a Lake, 2021/2024
Glass, organic matter, wood
27 x 300 x 300cm
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The Life and Death of Images (An Image Caught in a Vice), 2021/2024
Pallet, granite, glass, organic matter, vice
75 x 120 x 100cm
A Shipment Belonging to R.S., 2021/2024
Wood, glass, organic matter, nails, screws
120 x 120 x 80cm
Heavy Is the Image That Stands Between Place, 2021/2024
Pallets, wood, glass, organic matter, screws
140 x 100 x 100cm
An Image Raised by Two Arms, 2021/2024
Pallets, wood, glass, organic matter
240 x 400 x 100cm
The Partial Formation of a Roof, 2021/2024
Wood, glass, organic matter, screws
335 x 290 x 145cm
Snakes and Ladders, 2021/2024
Forklift, pallets, ladders
500 x 640 x 120cm
The Axis of Time, 2021/2024
Pallets, rebar
240 x 480 x 200cm
The Storyteller, 2021/2024
Pallet, wooden chair, granite
110 x 120 x 100cm
The Book of Stone, 2021/2024
Granite
15 x 12 x 20cm