Emery, Sand & Glass

1 review for Emery, Sand & Glass

1. 

   Jonathan Garratt – January 16, 2023

   David Burnham: Emery, Sand & Glass.
   “Go in at a fast trot and wait for things to stop you.” This is the advice of someone who is used to visiting museums and galleries. It can be quite effective in my opinion. As viewers of culture we are on a hunt for interest, validity and a sense of being addressed. Of being enjoined in a common enquiry, involving concision and not a little magic with any luck.
   I have been making pots since I was sixteen and have got very used to looking at things and evaluating them. So when David Burnham’s work fell across my radar for the first time, I felt a strong physical sensation. There was a bodily impact of something being observed, inflected and delivered. And with a strong, quiet authority. I was experiencing power. These works seem analogous to poster art, which is frequently punchy and effective, but short lived. Burnham’s images have, in contrast, a tenacious and palpable texture, with the, often pale blue, linen backing breaking through to provide a pleasurable depth and flavour to the pieces. Something to get your teeth into. Printed imposition becomes a story, over time, of construction, by adding paint and removing it, to reveal meaningful compositions. It’s a sculptors attitude and process, but in two dimensions. The images don’t just happen. They have gestated and grown from a sort of timeless well. They seem ancient, not new, seen for the first time. Found even. One of the several magnetisms I feel is a sense of them being the latest fruit of the millennia old practice of cave painting. Rock art. Ten thousand BC. And the imagery produced then in many parts of the world can have a direct impact on us and our world now. Feeling the texture in these works brings a sense of being anchored in that “Urzeit”, where the outdoors is normal and the rough cave walls are imbued with vital messaging for the community.
   I do think this book is very powerful. It has weight, and therefore significance. I feel someone is talking to me, hard to explain. Composition is a language, real food. Burnham’s collage constructions deliver a sense of genuine enquiry, discovery and a glimpse of wonder. This sort of visual cuisine could easily produce slick, lightweight, copycat art with no real significance, but there is here, for me, palpable weight in this contemporary megalithic art. Shiny it isn’t, so an affinity with woven textiles is not far away and that can bring a visual warmth alongside the inevitable questions we feel surfacing. Many of us now have sensations of redundancy, fear and isolation in a world where all the wrong values are currently in play, involving untruths, shallowness and self-promotion, so this cultural story has important validity for us all, signposting a far more fruitful way of celebrating our lives together and communicating at a proper level. Watching these works, and I use the term advisedly, I realise I am watching someone dreaming. And I’ve been let into the show. It might be said that this series has been “born” from walking in the open air, where one can produce one’s own film show simply by moving about outdoors. A geological experience is never far away here.
   What I really pick up is the sense of travel, an exploration, like a good walk through previously unseen questions and pleasures.
   If there were only one permissible thing to say, it might perhaps be this: “David Burnham understands beauty”. An intellectual tenderness informs all his work, coupled with a respect for antiquity and an acute, comprehending eye in what he produces.
   There is a sense of excitement in being admitted to unknown territory where pleasurable surprise is normal. Of rearranging histories in which original (sanding woodwork) events are conscripted or hijacked into new marriages in a new visual terrain. Burnham has personally developed a private creative landscape and in so doing has constructed a new alphabet for cultural power. These works are strong. There is conviction in play and we can feel it. By welding differing art practices together Burnham has offered us surprisingly beneficial travel by another means, to somewhere we knew all along, but never knew how to get there.
   Jonathan Garratt BA Cantab, FRSA. Dorset, U.K. 2022.