My Re-Enchantment

Marc Garrett, ,

Art residency at Hamilton MAS from October to December 2022

This week I begin my three-month residency ending with an exhibition called The Re-Enchantment at the art project space, Hamilton MAS, Felixstowe, Suffolk, UK.

This residency and exhibition will allow me to reexamine my artistic connection with nature. After spending over 25 years working with digital technologies. I want to relearn what it’s like to be humanly connected to nature again in a technological world under the conditions of climate collapse. What personal questions will emerge through the artmaking process, and what kind of stories and images will begin to find themselves as the work progresses?

C24. Head and Hole 1. A4. Collage, paint, drawing. 2022. Marc Garrett.
Crow Boy Clutching at Tree, 1987, oil on Canvas, 8 x 5 ft. By Marc Garrett.

Our addiction to technology and capitalism has left us impoverished, where we are all devalued alongside nature. This new work marks a new episode in my life as a time for re-enchantment. It’s not just nature that urgently needs dealing with; it’s us. I aim to reconfigure my relationship with the world. I am reconnecting to art I made over thirty years ago when I lived in the countryside, bringing back themes that explored elements of folk mythologies and methods of abstraction mixed with figurative motifs. I will bring a hybrid approach that includes aspects of nature, drawing, painting, and other types of art making, ideas around networks, and the human body and mind. At the same time, it will reflect on aspects of my cancer condition, which I’m presently recovering.

Slug Art 2022.

“After cycling and getting back home, putting food waste into the compost bin and cleaning the cat sick off the bottom of my shoes, I found this amazing piece of slug art. The universe is telling me something.”

C25. Hole 2. A4. Collage, paint, drawing. 2022. Marc Garrett.

Residency Work Plan

I will work in the shopfront space of Hamilton Mas in front of passers-by, who will have the option to enter the space and ask questions about the work being made. These few months will be dedicated to producing a series of paintings and drawings on paper and canvas, eventually filling the gallery’s walls. At the end of this intensive period, I will stage an exhibition and an event and present the paintings, different types of art produced and the ideas explored. I will invite artists, conservationists, and experts relevant to the debate in the region for a public conversation about how life would be different without global digital technologies. After that, I intend to build on what has been gathered and learned to be included in a longer exhibition at Hamilton Mas in April 2023.

Published by Marc Garrett

Marc Garrett is co-director and co-founder, with artist Ruth Catlow of the arts collective Furtherfield, beginning on the Internet in 96. Furtherfield has two physical venues, a gallery and a Commons lab, both situated in the park, in Finsbury Park, London. Has curated over 50 contemporary Media Arts exhibitions, projects nationally and internationally. Main editor of the Furtherfield web site. Written for various books and articles about art, technology and social change. Two key Furtherfield publications include co-editing of 'Artists Re:Thinking Games' with Ruth Catlow and Corrado Morgana 2010, and recently on 'Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain' with Ruth Catlow, Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner 2017. Currently in the write up of last year of Phd at the University of London, Birkbeck College. Emerging in the late 80′s from the streets exploring creativity via agit-art tactics. Using unofficial, experimental platforms such as the streets, pirate radio such as the locally popular ‘Savage Yet Tender’ alternative broadcasting 1980′s group, net broadcasts, BBS systems, performance, intervention, events, pamphlets, warehouses and gallery spaces. In the early nineties, was co-sysop (systems operator) with Heath Bunting on Cybercafe BBS with Irational.org. Furtherfield’s mission is to co-create extraordinary art that connects with contemporary audiences providing innovative, engaging and inclusive digital and physical spaces for appreciating and participating in practices in art, technology and social change. As well as finding alternative ways around already dominating hegemonies, thus claiming for ourselves and our peer networks a culturally aware and critical dialogue beyond traditional hierarchical behaviours. Influenced by situationist theory, fluxus, free and open source culture, and processes of self-education and peer learning, in an art, activist and community context.