FORMS OF IMAGINING 09.07–04.03.10 PROJECT ARTS CENTRE
David Bennewith & Joseph Churchward, Heman Chong, Matthias Bitzer, Isabel Nolan, David Noonan, Pae White Curated by Tessa Giblin
Introduction Artworks King Rat List of Works Biographies
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Introduction
‘All was dark and silent, the black shadows thrown by the moonlight seeming full of a silent mystery of their own. Not a thing seemed to be stirring, but all to be grim and fixed as death or fate; so that a thin streak of white mist, that crept with almost imperceptible slowness across the grass towards the house, seemed to have a sentience and a vitality of its own.’ —Mina Harker’s Journal, Dracula Like the ‘rat king’ phenomenon from which the exhibition takes its title, the artworks and artists exhibited in King Rat are entangled and intertwined. It is an environment in which form and aesthetics rest easily next to history, context and imagination. An extraordinary natural phenomenon, there are very few recorded examples of ‘rat kings’ in the world. When a litter of young rats are in the nest, their tails can become intertwined and ensnared in materials such as horse hair, twine or dried blood, trapping the rats in a mass formation of bodies growing amongst the interlocked throng of tails. Growing heavier over years and reliant on feeding from parents, the King Rat is known to have crashed through a ceiling, an event taken as either an omen for the presence of witches in the home or as a harbinger of disease. Absent from the scene of the exhibition, yet a fundamental source of inspiration is the bloody-thirsty figure of Dracula. Within the entanglement of art and nightmare, shadows form amidst a prevailing sense of unease, where beauty, intrigue and formal abstraction rest against an intangible performative presence. Horror and violence enter the gallery through allusions to folklore, superstition, ghost-stories and a shifty appropriation of culture. Artworks are understood as a hybrid phenomenon, bracketed moments that straddle icons, histories and contexts, occupying a shadowy inbetween place and giving it form. And at the conceptual centre sits an entangled giant – the writhing, breathing King Rat. Tessa Giblin
King Rat, exhibition view, Project Arts Centre, 2010
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David Bennewith (NZ) & Joseph Churchward (NZ / WS) ‘I can employ your language, that’s easy, but I can also retain my other ness as something other than an object of your knowledge. A form, like the body of a plant or of shapes that cut or mark the skin, forms that are not readable or legible.’ —Paul Elliman, after Joseph Churchward & Friends
David Bennewith and Joseph Churchward’s relationship is built upon Bennewith’s research into Churchward’s type design and graphic work. Ampersand has been installed in King Rat as a wall drawing, hovering above the natural horizon of the wall and leading the eye on a journey around the room. It is borne out of the once bi-cultural and now multi-cultural context of the Maori, Pakeha (European), Samoan, Tongan and other mixed cultures who live together in New Zealand / Aotearoa. Churchward’s Maori typography coagulates design that is most commonly recognised in moko (facial tattoo) and modes of carving derived from the koru: a representation of the young unfurling of a new-born fern. Translating these forms into type, Churchward mixes the vernacular of the interdependant cultures of Maori and Pakeha, with roman letters that extend with curling korus and the decorative filling of negative space. As a symbol, Ampsersand implies an array of mixed messages located at the meeting point of any two languages or knowledge systems that compete for dominance, survival and autonomy. Paul Elliman writes of Churchward’s Ampersand: ‘The ampersand has 4/5
KING RAT David Bennewith & Joseph Churchward Ampersand, 2009 Wall drawing from Joseph Churchward’s typeface Maori, 1981–1984, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists.
become a magical living creature, an inky hydra, the mass of tentacles unfurling from its mouth. There can’t be many typefaces that take their form after a visual motif associated firmly with a non-literate, oral culture. Or one whose sinuous lines refer not to a classical history of letters but to a separate tradition of highly symbolic material objects.’
Matthias Bitzer Your mind is moving, but your body lies still, 2009 Acrylic and ink on raw canvas. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Iris Kadel.
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Matthias Bitzer commonly works in both sculpture and painting, and sometimes extends these media to create architectural environments, plinths, and installations. Bitzer has a fascination for historical figures and, in the case of King Rat, he focuses on literary luminaries whose personal lives hold as much imaginative potential as their literary contributions. He works with portraiture and other identifiable subjects, applying to their figurative realism a fantastic realism of his own, one that is committed to abstraction and imagination. Your mind is moving, but your body lies still is a large painting which features twin portraits of infamous English occultist Aleister Crowley and Portuguese lyricist and poet Fernando Pessoa (who during his lifetime catalogued a large number of heteronyms – words or names that are spelled identically but have different sounds and meanings). In their portrait, the two friends conduct a silent but sentient conversation of the mind, much as they did during their lives (only discovered by the general public when their exchanged letters were discovered in an old trunk). ‘And I, I am truly the centre, that doesn’t exist except as a convention in the geometry of the abyss. I am the nothingness around which this movement spins.’ —Fernando Pessoa
The two sculptures which sail around the room, their dead sails catching the sundowner wind, are formed from another body of work by Bitzer that is based on the life
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Matthias Bitzer
and novels of Joseph Conrad. The tall sculpture with extended sails and seemingly broken masts is titled my ships will be sailing, while the resting sculpture with a destroyed hull and gaping holes is titled as the world disappears. Both works remind us of ocean voyages as well as the psychological journeys that characterise many of Conrad’s narratives including Heart of Darkness (which also served as a catalyst for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now). Although these literary figures are very much a part of the conceptualisation behind Bitzer’s work they can also be evacuated from the centre of the artwork, leaving it free to up-anchor and drift stealthily across the room. 8/9
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Matthias Bitzer as the world disappears (left), my ships will be sailing (right), 2008. Yarn, wire, plastic, wood. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Iris Kadel.
Heman Chong
(SG)
Blanketed with stained black cards, Heman Chong’s omnipresent floor shifts and moves as you traverse the landscape of King Rat. Originally made for the Singapore Biennale in 2008, Monument to the people we’ve conveniently forgotten (I hate you) is as dark in its associations as it is in colour. The 250,000 cards that sweep across the floor of the gallery are a shifting monument to the pain and resentment of any individual, observed in close quarters by the artist while he was working as a psychiatrist’s assistant. The title of the work refers to a process of annexation: the deletion of a relationship in one’s past as an action of self-preservation, denial or a projection of hatred. Creating an unstable and shifting terrain underfoot, this fluid mass also tries to scuffle out the door. It is a monument that moves and repositions itself daily – much like the complex, spontaneous and contradictory emotions that steer our mental compartmentalisations of resentment, hatred and even grief.
Heman Chong Monument to the people we’ve conveniently forgotten (I hate you), 2008 Offset prints on 190gsm paper, approx 250,000 copies. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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Isabel Nolan
Isabel Nolan A small place among visible things, 2010 Polyethylene, jesmonite, paint, toughened glass, MDF. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin gallery.
(IE)
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Where the bee sucks, there suck I: In a cowslip’s bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry …
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Isabel Nolan’s animated tapestry and tumbling sculpture originate from a practice that encompasses painting, craft, film and sculptural works. She harnesses an instinctive formal intelligence to communicate the unsettling, intangible, or – in her own words – ‘inscrutable’ qualities of the aesthetic spectrum. Nolan jumps fluidly between media, creating beguilingly fragile objects alongside roughly comical pieces that refer to home-spun craft. A small place among visible things is a cascading pile of balls that burst and tumble in a fountain of rich purple. Crouched and still beneath the waves of movement sits a nest egg – a smaller, powdery, ochre-orange ball. The endless repetition suggested by the limitless void of the reflective surface on which the sculpture rests is reiterated in Nolan’s work Only the tough-minded find themselves at home, 2010. In this hanging tapestry, bat-like creatures flit between the trees, their wings whipping the air with the sharpness of the blade that created them. What seem to be sinister, mind-influencing calls of kitsch-cats emanate from the branches above. One can’t be sure whether the cats are scaring the bats, or whether the flight of the creatures outwards from the tapestry into the room is at the behest of the feline commanders. Open to many different fantasies, both artworks call to mind a passage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
Isabel Nolan Only the tough-minded find themselves at home, 2010 Mixed fabric, embroidery silk and thread. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin gallery.
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David Noonan
(AU / IE)
The works made by David Noonan since 2006 are almost all untitled. This simple fact reveals one of the most enabling aspects of his work: the lack of roots, references, quotes and names allows his work to sample and layer without defining the borrowed images as something known or already experienced. His sculptures, screenprints, installations, films and collages exist as hectic and expansive windows into a chaotic world of rehearsal, performance, pantomime and ritual. A palimpsest of resampled and collaged photographs, their living subjects are frozen in time. They behave like a stuttering film projection jammed in the shutter, similar to the experience of repeatedly opening one’s eyes to compile multiple flash frames on the surface of the retina. In this way, Noonan gives life to the suspended subject with an animated flickering of light and shadow. Untitled, the silk screen work in King Rat, consists of multiple images cut out and layered one on top of the other. A face masked with a thick layer of plaster is overlaid with the same image, cut into abstract shapes derived from tapestry design, building up the surface of the silk screen much like a relief. This juxtaposition of abstraction and figuration is a hallmark of Noonan’s work. Untitled, the sculpture, presents a more singular image. A little dancer, midway through an awkward pirouette, coquettishly gestures within her 16/17
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David Noonan Untitled, 2010 Silk screen on jute and linen collage on wood, 204 × 144cm. Courtesy the artist and HOTEL.
heavy costume. The performer, whose makeup gives the impression of a bruised face and whose oversized cloak is topped with an elaborate headdress, is not of a classical dance tradition. From one angle, she is a forlorn little figure that stands in for the rest of her troupe and, from the flipside, she is a mischievous player.
David Noonan Untitled, 2010 Sculpture, screen-print on jute, wood, steel.Courtesy the artist and HOTEL.
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Pae White Sundowner, 2009 Cotton and polyester. Courtesy the artist and 1301PE.
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Pae White lives and works in California, and is known for her sensitively aestheticized artworks informed by both contemporary art and the wider fields of design and craft. Her work in the exhibition, titled Sundowner, is a largescale tapestry in which plumes of smoke drift across a wall, producing a three-dimensional effect. Wind patterns in California are most commonly easterly. However, when there is a region of high pressure directly to the north, an offshore westerly wind occurs, which residents of the Santa Barbara area refer to as a ‘sundowner’. As the air travels downwards from the Santa Ynez Mountains to the sea it heats and dries, blowing with the most intense force when the wind direction is perpendicular to the mountains. Sundowners are particularly dangerous during wildfire season, when gale force hot winds can make firefighting virtually impossible, as seen during the disastrous 1990 Painted Cave Fire. Pae White’s Sundowner is produced in the heroic tradition of tapestry, frozen momentarily in its drifting progress across the wall. Its beauty is captivating, its materiality wonderful, and yet it is shadowed by a meaningful darkness possessed by tragedy and danger.
Texts by Tessa Giblin
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Pae White
King Rat
‘Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will! … Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave some of the happiness you bring!’ 1
Horror is a form of dreaming. The Terrors that come unbidden in the night, the images without form, narratives without logic or progression, the word less speech and the soundless scream. The body frozen, unable to move, paralysed; the unbearable pressure on the chest, like a weight, like an incubus pressing down upon us. And yet, at the same time, the excitement, the arousal, the body flooding with adrenaline, the heart racing. Psychoanalysis has long been preoccupied by the meaning of fear, by the Gothic. Sigmund Freud was the father of modern psychoanalysis, facing forward into the twentieth century. He was simultaneously the last and greatest of the nineteenth century’s Gothic writers, creating an imaginative world of contorted and disfigured sexual-familial relations in which the past, infancy, looms over the present, adulthood, exercising a monstrous, inescapable influence on individuals who are, as a consequence, driven beyond sanity by the unbearable burden of dark secrets. Realism in art is sometimes a means of evading reality. Horror, Freud believed, could be uncanny, unheimlich, unhomely, caught between different states, hovering between certainties, violating clear category distinctions so that the thing which was formerly secure becomes unstable. That which we thought insentient slowly begins to move, the dead come to life. All that is solid melts into air, into mist. In the world of the uncanny, even our homes are strange to us, concealing secrets, hiding terrors behind welcoming doors. In the world of the uncanny, we are strangers to ourselves. The face that stares back at us out of the mirror is another’s (it is said, indeed, that mirrors and copulation are abominable, as they increase the numbers of men). Whatever is really there can only be glimpsed momentarily, out of the corner of the retina. The ground shifts beneath our feet. Visitors to Freud’s surgery in Vienna, sitting in his waiting room for an audience with the Master, would have seen hanging on the wall a framed print of Henry Fuseli’s Romantic masterpiece The Nightmare, the greatest of all Gothic images in which a repulsive goblin squats like a toad on the breast of
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a beautiful sleeping woman. It is an image of both terror and desire, an image which has haunted horror across the centuries which followed – the shadow of the hand falling slowly across the sleeper’s face, the vampire bending over his prey, the woman wailing for her demon lover. It is anxiety made art. One of the visitors to Freud’s clinic was named Paul Lorenz, or perhaps he was called Ernst Lanzer (there are no certainties here), but history has come to know him by the name Freud gave him, ‘The Rat Man’. LorenzLanzer was obsessed with the image of rats eating their way into the rectum of his father and of his fiancée. In his fantasy, he fastened pots full of rats to their buttocks, and waited. His father had been dead for many years. (Is the rectum a grave? This was a question asked by the Freudian critic and queer theorist Leo Bersani in 1987, in the middle of that decade’s AIDS crisis, at a time in which hating Others was in danger of becoming automatic.) In 1897, as Freud was beginning his work on psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams, Bram Stoker published Dracula. Count Dracula is Death, he is King Rat, and the rats and other foul creatures do his bidding. His rank breath and putrid, earth-filled coffin are his Dark Entries and signify his anality: the mouth which is an anus which is a grave: ‘There was an earthy smell, as of some dry miasma, which came through the fouler air. But as to the odour itself, how shall I describe it? It was not alone that it was composed of all the ills of mortality and with the pungent, acrid smell of blood, but it seemed as though corruption had become itself corrupt. Faugh! It sickens me to think of it. Every breath exhaled by that monster seemed to have clung to the place and intensified its loathsomeness … We all instinctively drew back. The whole place was becoming alive with rats … The rats were multiplying in their thousands, and we moved out.’ Renfield, Dracula’s slave, emulates his master’s Unclean Eating, trapping flies with sugar, to feast upon their little lives. 2
The Count lands on English shores in his death ship, his coffin ship, blown by the storm he has summoned (he is the storm) into the arms of Whitby harbour, its captain lashed , dead, to the wheel. Whitby! Who would have thought that this picturesque village on the North Yorkshire coast, tucked away beyond the moors, with its ancient, ruined abbey, its fishing fleets and its genteel hotels, would have been so welcoming to the King of Terrors? Bram Stoker spent his holidays there, reading and taking notes.
The dead travel fast. The Count heads for London, the heart of Empire, the great city, where the action is, where the people are, flies to trap: ‘I long to go through the streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.’ He sets himself up in suburban splendour, in Carfax Abbey, next door to a lunatic asylum. Carfax is the Crossroads, Quatre face, four faces, the place where two roads meet, facing in all directions; the place where you sell your soul to the devil; the place between two worlds, matter and spirit, the living and the dead; the place where criminals, outside the law, were hanged, where suicides were buried. Where else would he go? In 1897, then, we might have found the Count strolling through the streets of London, dressed in a Panama hat, taking in all that it had to offer, a flâneur hiding in plain sight. In 1899, with the century looking both ways, Janus-faced, Charlie Marlow, narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, sat on the deck of the Nellie, a cruising yawl, looking out over Gravesend (where else would he go?), ‘without a flutter of sails’: ‘A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.’ Marlow has a tale to tell, the story of his journey up the Congo on another death ship, piloted by a cannibal and powered, perhaps, by a demon, in search of Mr Kurtz, the prodigy, Empire made flesh: ‘educated partly in England, and – as he was good enough to say himself – his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’. Empire corrupts. The colonized head for the metropolis, immigrants, bringing with them retribution, pestilence, consequences. Bram Stoker, an Anglo-Irishman, and Joseph Conrad, Polish-Russian-English (all Europe contributed to his making), both knew this to be true. The Thames is at the centre of ‘a mighty waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth’, and its water flows both ways. Kurtz, like Renfield, like the Count himself, is an Unclean Eater, celebrant of unspeakable rights, anthropophage. That is to say, he is a colonizer. ‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ 3
In 1898, in Amsterdam, a book of decadent erotic verse in English and French was published by George Archibald Bishop. To emphasize the poetry’s selfindulgence, its masturbatory origins (and no doubt to shock), the volume was entitled White Stains. George Archibald Bishop was a pseudonym, of
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course. White Stains was written by Aleister Crowley, a renegade member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the greatest of all esoteric, occult societies. No Order could constrain Crowley for long, though, and he was soon in conflict with the Golden Dawn’s greatest poet, W. B. Yeats. Crowley was no poet, though he was many other things – occultist, mountaineer, sex magician, ipsissimus, Great Beast. Above all, he was a self-publicist. White Stains! Such figures appear at the end of Empires, when the sun sets. ‘And, at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.’ We wear many faces, like masks: the civilized man and the savage, the bureaucrat and the hierophant. We look both ways. ‘I am a nomadic wanderer through my consciousness,’ wrote the great Portuguese Modernist Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa was not one man but many, and invoked a number of personae – heteronyms, he called them – to inhabit his consciousness, to write his poems. Pessoa was the child of Empire, brought up in Durban, Natal, where his stepfather was the Portuguese consul. Back in downtown Lisbon, the Casa Pessoa survives today as a shrine and cultural centre, its walls painted a dazzling, sunny yellow. In 1931, Pessoa finally published his Portuguese translation of Aleister Crowley’s ‘Hymn to Pan’ (he was a better poet than Crowley deserved). Crowley corresponded with Pessoa, and in 1929 the pair had cooked up an extraordinary plan. Crowley, staying with his lover Hanni Jaeger in a hotel at the Boca do Inferno (the Mouth of Hell – where else would he go?), a rocky chasm on the Atlantic coast near Lisbon, would affect to commit suicide by jumping into the Mouth of Hell itself, leaving a suicide note in his monogrammed cigarette case. In his diary of September 21st, Crowley wrote, ‘I decide to do a suicide stunt to annoy Hanni. Arrange details with Pessoa.’ Pessoa’s role was to inform the press that the Great Beast had finally been dragged back to Hell. According to the London Empire News (where else would it go?), the suicide note read: ‘I cannot live without thee. The Mouth of Hell will catch me. It will not be as hot as thine. Hisos, Tu Li Yu.’ Tu Li Yu; or (for this was Crowley’s joke), Toodle-oo! Kiss me with those red lips … ‘Listen to them, the children of the night! What music they make!’ Darryl Jones
List of Works Pae White 1. Sundowner, 2009 Cotton and polyester Heman Chong 2. Monument to the people we’ve conveniently forgotten (I hate you), 2008 Offset prints on 190gsm paper, approx 250,000 copies Matthias Bitzer 3. Your mind is moving, but your body lies still, 2009 Acrylic and ink on raw canvas 4. my ships will be sailing, 2008 Yarn, wire, plastic, wood 5. as the world disappears, 2008 Yarn, wire, plastic, wood David Noonan 6. Untitled, 2010 Silk screen on jute and linen collage on wood, 204 × 144cm 7. Untitled, 2010 Sculpture, screen print on jute, wood, steel David Bennewith & Joseph Churchward 8. Ampersand, 2009 Wall drawing from Joseph Churchward’s typeface Maori, 1981–1984, dimensions variable Isabel Nolan 9. Only the tough-minded find themselves at home, 2010 Mixed fabric, embroidery silk and thread 10. A small place among visible things, 2010 Polyethylene, jesmonite, paint, toughened glass, MDF
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Biographies Bennewith, David (1977, New Zealand) is a graphic designer based in Amsterdam. Since 2008 he has produced and published non-commissioned work under the moniker Colophon. Colophon explores aspects of typography by examination, rehearsal and writing about typographic design related subjects. Recent projects in 2010 included Joseph Churchward, 2009; and Public Arena, a collaborative publication with Bik Van der Pol, 2009. Bennewith regularly teaches typography and editorial design at ArtEZ Institute of the Arts, Arnhem, and has taught and given lectures and workshops at various institutions including: the Royal College of Art, London; ELAM School of Fine Arts, Auckland; Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam; and Sint Lucas, Antwerp.
Chong, Heman (1977, Malaysia, raised in Singapore) is an artist, curator and writer based in New York and Singapore. His art practice involves an investigation into the philosophies, reason and methods of individuals and communities imagining the future. Charged with a conceptual drive, this research is adapted into objects, images, installations, situations or texts. Recent exhibitions include: Calendars (2020–2097), Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing, 2010; Christmas in July, Yvon Lambert, New York, 2010; and Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain, 2010. Heman Chong was one of the eight authors of PHILIP, Project Press 2007. He represented Singapore in the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003, and is represented by Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing/Guangzhou.
Bitzer, Matthias (1975, Germany) is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, wall drawings and installations. He lives and works in Berlin. At the crux of his art practice is an investigation into the contrasting formal and thematic concerns of abstract and figurative representation, creating an experiential space of history and identity. Recent exhibitions in 2010 included: Eckpunkt, Kunstverein Hannover, 2010; Kunstsammlung Gera, winner of the Otto Dix Prize, 2010; and Art Basel Miami Beach, USA, 2008. He is represented by: the Galerie Iris Kadel, Karlsruhe; Francesca Minini, Milan; and Almine Rech, Paris.
Churchward, Joseph (1933, Samoa) is a prolific New Zealand based graphic designer. He studied art at Wellington Technical College, New Zealand and in 1962 started his freelance practice Advertising Art Studio. This grew into Churchward International Typefaces which became New Zealand’s largest typesetting firm. To date, Joseph Churchward has handcrafted over 600 unique typefaces which have been distributed worldwide. He was awarded the Queen’s Service Medal for his typographic services during the 2010 Queen’s Birthday Honours, New Zealand. In 2008 the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, held a retrospective exhibition of his art work.
Nolan, Isabel (1974, Ireland) is an artist living and working in Dublin. Her narrativebased practice includes paintings, texts and sculptures that explore the implacable desire to understand both our inner lives and surrounding world. Recent exhibitions in 2010 included: on a perilous margin, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, 2009; Trance in Inaction, ARTSPACE, New Zealand, 2008; The Paradise #29, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2008. Her work was part of a group exhibition at the 2005 Venice Biennale and is held in several museum collections, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Hugh Lane Gallery. In 2011 she will have a major solo exhibition at Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne. She is represented by the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.
White, Pae (1963, USA) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. Her practice encourages the viewer to reassess and explore familiar encounters and everyday objects. The meticulous detail and intricate craftsmanship of White’s experiential smoke tapestries and cascading mobiles investigate the tension between the immateriality and physicality of the most unlikely objects. Recent exhibitions in 2010 included: Smoke Knows, 1301PE, Los Angeles, 2009; Point, Counterpoint, Cloud, Xavier Hufkens gallery, Brussels, 2009; and Pae White, greengrassi, London, 2007. She was included in the Whitney Biennial, New York, 2010, and is represented by 1301PE, Los Angeles. Jones, Darryl (Ireland) is Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. He has written and edited numerous books and articles, mostly on nineteenth-century literature, and on popular literature and culture, including Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (2002), and most recently It Came From the 1950s: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties (2011), with Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M. Murphy, and the Oxford edition of the collected ghost stories of M. R. James. He is currently working on an anthology of Victorian horror stories, also for Oxford University Press. He lives in suburban Dublin with his wife, his daughter, and his dog.
Noonan, David (1969, Australia) lives and works in London. His practice brings together an eclectic array of found imagery including archival photographs, film stills, books and magazines. The resulting sculptures, paintings, collages, screen prints and films fuse myth and realism by creating fictional histories and imaginary landscapes. Recent exhibitions in 2010 included: the 17th Biennale of Sydney; the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, 2010; the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, 2010; and the Tate Triennial, 2009. He is represented by Hotel, London, Foxy Productions, New York, David Kordansky Gallery, LA and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
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King Rat Published as an edition of Forms of Imagining, a series published by Project Press based on the exhibitions program of Project Arts Centre. Dublin, May 2014 ISBN 978-1-872493-42-8 Editor: Tessa Giblin © The Artists, Writers and Project Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission of the publishers. Text: Tessa Giblin, Darryl Jones Designed in Ireland by WorkGroup Sub-Editor: Kate Heffernan King Rat 9 July – 4 September, 2010 David Bennewith & Joseph Churchward, Heman Chong, Matthias Bitzer, Isabel Nolan, David Noonan and Pae White Curated by Tessa Giblin Project Press Project Arts Centre 39 East Essex Street Temple Bar Dublin 2 Ireland Tel: + 353 (0)1 881 9613 info@projectartscentre.ie www.projectartscentre.ie Project Arts Centre is supported by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council. With thanks to the artists and lenders, Galerie Iris Kadel, Karlsruhe, 1301PE, Los Angeles, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and HOTEL, London. With special thanks also to the Goethe Institut Dublin for supporting King Rat.