Kenneth Martin & David Griffiths
1 May – 20 June 1999
Whether working as a painter or as a sculptor, Kenneth Martin (1905-84) saw his art as a product of time. This exhibition combined the Chance and Order paintings and drawings of Martin’s last fifteen years with the earlier Screw Mobiles and other related works. Together, they demonstrated Kenneth Martin’s position as one of the liveliest and most inventive constructive artists of the 20th century.
Whether working as a painter or as a sculptor, Kenneth Martin (1905-84) saw his art as a product of time. He resisted any idea of the artist as the ‘Almighty’, pushing things around at will, and preferred to initiate a sequence of events and observe the changes and eventual outcome. Fascinated by the way movement can create form, he constructed mobiles which combined the implied movement of spirals with actual revolution. Frequently he used given systems such as the Fibonacci series or pendulum permutations but in the late ’60s he introduced chance as an active partner in the rules he set for each work.
David Griffiths’ intimate and detailed colour photographs, from his “Extracts” series, focus on a landscape yet to be recorded on most maps. Outside Dover, geography and history have been reshaped in a new coastal landscape created with the earth extracted from the Channel Tunnel. This is a landscape of odd pathways, roads, lakes, bridges, stone circles and grassy mounds which blurs the distinction between the natural and manmade.