Red Earth series 2001

The Red Earth series focuses on the idea of dialogue. These works can be seen as portraits of the named dedicatees, but they are also understood as reflections of the maker and viewer, the pieces being oblique views of others glimpsed through their own words or images.

The series title, Red Earth, originally comes from an orchestral work by Michael Finnissy, based on a 'reminiscence of [an] impression' of flying across Australia.

For Andrews 'red earth' has become a term that defines a specific relation between thought and action, or between a desired state and external/internal forces that exclude that state or access to it. Red earth means the individual cause of stress, a focus on that place of experience/reality that causes or creates or identifies a specific vision.

Red Earth (for Primo Levi) (2001) is a meditation on the act of 'distilling' - as described by Levi in The Periodic Table. The text is a reduction of a longer paragraph to twelve almost separate words which act as a 'table'. The words create a kind of network, almost divorced from each other but emphasizing the intervals between them (and, of course, the words and images create another layer of network). The idea of the interval is a key factor in this piece as in most of my recent work, and relates not only to poetry but more specifically to music (actually this is more true when seen in the light of Red Earth (for Akira Kurosawa), In Translation, For Andrea or Versus). The interval can be understood in two ways in the musical sense - one is the specific distance between two tones (notes on a scale), the other is the distance between a repeating beat or gesture. In other words it can be seen both vertically and horizontally and each has quite a particular meaning or difference.

Red Earth (for Akira Kurosawa) (2001) is a 'temporal/atemporal rearrangement' of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. This film interested me because of it's underlying non-linear form. It is a kind of visual detective story (event) where the viewer repeatedly goes through the same territory and images, unearthing not the truth but the web of rationalised truths and lies created by the protagonists. At the heart of the film is murder and deception (both of others and of ourselves). The murder gives the deception its force and depth of meaning, so that we are made aware of the ultimately destructive quality inherent in deception or at least in this particular set of deceptions. The other brutalising quality that is explicit in the film is the casualness of the event which is the seed of the tragedy.

Kurosawa's film uses various devices to give the whole story. He attempts to give several contexts to the main events as well as depicting witnesses and defendents speaking directly to camera. The viewer is placed in the position of judgement, hearing the stories and completing the overall truth. In this way the viewer is implicated in the realisation of yet another facet of the story.

Red Earth (for Jasper Johns) (2001) is a work that plays on two main references. The first, and most obvious, is to the series of pieces by Jasper Johns of numbers. Specifically his Zero through Nine works. The second reference is to a 'drawing' by Robert Rauschenberg called Palimpsest which is simply an erased drawing by Willem deKooning. In my image I have taken a Zero through Nine study and digitally 'erased' all the numbers from two to nine.

The red stone 'background' is not a photograph but a digitally rendered texture which, for me, invokes the shadowy cave world that Plato described.

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