Two halves of a given complex

'Two halves of a given complex' is a composite artwork that was exhibited at Gallery North as part of a two-person exhibition titled '...of a kind'. The artwork re-presents a number of projects produced for the public sphere by Tatham & O’Sullivan since 2017. The genesis of this work began as an invitation (by Matthew Hearn) to revisit 'Is this what brings things into focus' (2017) a large-scale, temporary sculptural installation developed by the artists for the Coachella music festival, California, USA . The set of ceramic vases re-positioned in the exhibition are based on the1:50 scale maquettes originally made for this artwork. The vases were slip-cast as an edition for The Modern Institute gallery in Glasgow. In this new context, they are presented on a table that has a schematic relationship with the new context they find themselves in — the campus quad that can be seen from the gallery windows. Across the quad, in Student Central, a found GIFF, which riffs on the Coachella work, is presented on the library information screen. Unannounced and uninterpreted, the image is intended to be encountered as an aside from the gallery presentation, both able to speak back to the work in Gallery North, but also to have a new life. Back in the gallery, displayed on a series of A-boards, is a sequence of documentation from other public projects, now reworked through drawing and collage. These latter structures again pull representative forms of previous works into new contexts, reflexively questioning the role and function of these new form representations. Serialised in poster form in A-series dimensions, these works are about relational encounter and the re-circulation of images. Un-scaled and reconstructed amidst an interlacing frame of hand drawn marks they translocate the artworks to remote situations in which dimensionality is uncertain.