Dormant hand tools, the forgotten ones that are discovered at the bottom of old tool boxes, but which are still redolent with the quirks of their former lives and owners, are repurposed and given new meaning. They become fused and bound together with other cultural flotsam to become magical tools, talismanic components to use in a landscape of new forms, connected now to charm, heal, restore and navigate towards a different, less well defined purpose.
Imagination is memory re-arranged. The artist can be a cohesive catalyst in society, enabling remembering and asking us not to turn away, and particularly in these times, reminding us of the tyranny of our preferences, and the consequences of the choices we make.
The objects are mythic composits, power objects, tools to provoke dreams, invoke wild visions. Perhaps they are bridges to the Cave Mind, to old songs and old stories.
Artists can be visionaries, who know the power of manifesting dreams through image making and who know the power of externalising the internal.
Through the ages, the shaman/artist/visionary knew the power of bridges, the liminal gateways to re-connection. Beyond image, beyond preference, beyond idea and representation, lies an essence of localized spirit, that which is so often forgotten.
The objects are silent witnesses, the relics of a forgotten tribe that never existed. They provoke questions; What have we forgotten? What can we remember? Where are we going?
The Parallel Reality Toolkits are unfamiliar bundles of familiar things, lashed together and fused into new forms; eccentric, hopeful, magical, lost and impractical.
The new tool bundles are resources, keys for asymmetrical solutions to long forgotten problems. They are the cultural artefacts of a people who never existed, or the collected and taxonomised remnants of a historical display discovered in the back of a dusty provincial museum.
They are testament to the separation and intense solitude we are creating in our world, where linear thinking, progress and mechanisation tempt us to become the instruments of our own dissolution.
Stuart Turner