Title: Anticipating Albion l

Medium: Oil on canvas with made object.

Dimensions in cm:  100 x 90.8

Price on collection from studio: £190.00

Year made: 2006.

About the work: This work is part of a series completes in 2006 that explores travel and nostalgia. The following is a statement that was part of the outdoor installation that was part of this work.

‘It seems to me that I would always be better of where I am not, and this question of moving is one of those I discuss incessantly with my soul.’                                             Charles Baudelaire.

As a society we are captivated by new destinations, both spiritual and worldly, immersed in a search for the holy grail of an ‘intellectual truth’ that we cannot locate in our present temporal and spatial home. In a world incessantly “becoming” something else, we labour to construct better futures by examining historical events, but both the future we desire and the past we examine have taken on the quality of permanence both temporally and spatially, they are places where we imagine we ceased ‘becoming’. This sense of permanence, given especially to nostalgic memories we transfer to our ambitions for the future, we avidly want to ‘arrive’, we want to cease ‘becoming’ and ‘become’ content in our own narrative.

In here book ‘Questions of Travel’; Caren Kaplan describes tourism as heralding the post-modern. ‘it is a product of the rise of consumer culture, leisure and technological innovation,’ she also examines the origins of what is nostalgia in Western Culture, born in forced exile from homeland, family and language. As a Scot I am aware of many historical instances of forced exile, one such event being the Highland Clearances, many other Scots chose exile through circumstance, chiefly poverty, providing European armies throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries with countless mercenaries. This sense of displacement interpreted and celebrated in the traditional songs and poetry of Scotland is today usurped and we attach these nouveau feelings of loss to the inescapable temporal dislocation of a lived life.

“Nostalgia is often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of something they themselves have transformed” and is “a process of yearning, for what one has destroyed that is a form of mystification.”                                                                                       Renato Rosald

In nostalgia we are constantly seeking what we ourselves destroy.

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