Lacon, A., Hammonds, K., Dara, E., 2017.

Fragments

Fragments consisted of a solo Exhibition, Publication and Artefact (Edition)

Exhibtion:
Andrew Lacon's newly commissioned response to Gallery 1 at DCA is a bold and minimal undertaking. It takes the form of a substantial yet subtle installation across the whole gallery that challenges our expectations regarding how artworks are presented and asks questions about how certain raw materials are understood and valued in different contexts across space and time.

Lacon has long been interested in how public displays of objects can explore relationships between national culture, social class and artistic intention, and this exhibition considers these ideas by focusing on one single raw material now synonymous with the history of art and architecture: marble.

The story of this work can be traced back to a journey the artist made from Mexico City to Birmingham in 2015, carrying a cotton rucksack filled with a stack of Mexican pink marble through customs. Aspects of this journey mirror Lacon's ongoing artistic investigation into the often complex political lives of materials: how they are obtained, appropriated, and used far from their places of origin. Fragments positions these expansive ideas in a deceptively simple way, using specific colours, shapes and forms to hint at underlying narratives and overlooked histories.

For this project, which is Lacon's first solo exhibition in a UK institution, he invites us to be active participants within his work, to re-think how we move through public spaces and encounter materials, objects and artworks in the world around us.

Publication:
Published on the occasion of the artist's first solo exhibition in a UK institution at Dundee Contemporary Arts. This full colour publication acts as an enlightening accompaniment to Andrew Lacon's site-specific response to the DCA galleries. Andrew Lacon: Fragments features a newly commissioned essay by Kit Hammonds, curator of Museo Jumex in Mexico City, and an introduction by DCA's Head of Exhibitions Eoin Dara.

Edition:
For his edition, Lacon worked with DCA Print Studio to create handmade paper incorporating fine marble dust that gives a tactile, textured surface with a subtle sparkle. He then took broken terrazzo pieces from his floor installation and, on the print studio floor, broke them with a hammer into smaller fragments.

Combining these raw materials in a way that is more sculptural than graphic, the flooring scraps were hand-printed, according to Lacon's direction, in random arrangements using five different colours from the same palette as his installation. The ink was transferred using physical pressure to the back of the paper leaving a slightly embossed edge that hints at the weight of the sculptural elements.

This resulted in a series of unique prints from which Lacon further selected to make the variations in the edition. The title for the edition, Fragment, suggests the connection of these works to Lacon's DCA exhibition as well as describing the way in which each individual print is a part of the whole edition which, like the terrazzo pieces, may be moved, re-distributed and read in different ways.