Laurence Owen has made a series of hybridised sculptural forms reminiscent of kayaks, catamarans and surfboards. Within these structures, paintings made by other artists whom Owen has invited to contribute, are held or suspended. In accord with this decision, Owen probes at historical notions of romantic but problematic ideas of mastery, of a single “genius” isolated in the studio, as opposed to opening up a collective model that requires discourse, exchange and collaboration coming from varying perspectives. Here, the viewer is able to ride the surge upon which different artists’ voices corroborate to become one, singularly-authorless whole. The creative immersion with other makers also elicits assimilated experience when confronted with forces greater than oneself—in this case, particularly the sea—commonly described as an ‘ego-death’.

This contributive effort has culminated in the exhibition generating a neurotic image summarising a feeling in time. The forms simulate aquatic sport equipment associated with the outdoor environment and physical activity. But here they are subverted, occupying a ramped-up tonality and vibrancy connotative of the manufactured, urban and synthetic. They are almost hallucinatory in their colour and form: edges melt, aesthetics merge, images of nature computerise, surreal DALL-E figures embed themselves into the resined surfaces, and the equipped maritime accessories such as hooks, straps and handles are void of essential function as they hang off the urban walls of St Chad’s Projects. Questions around whether the power of specified branding—in particular here, surf-culture-as-example, its general inculcation and absorption into perceptions—is a world-builder of such magnitude that it bypasses nature altogether: can one without access to the natural environment feel closer to fabricated ideas of the sea via branding modes than by standing on the sea’s edge? This is a simulation of sorts, a deep utilisation prior to, and alongside, augmented reality sites today.

This in question alerts us to inspect the accumulative effects of living in an era where everything and nothing is absorbed on a daily basis. Natural ‘essence’ is hijacked by synthetic simulation and harnessed as evolution. Transferring our world that reveals itself through a flattened interface into our Away From Keyboard spheres as the same compressed picture—Metaverses open up as dimensions appear to close down.

Surfing the Hell Realm is not about surf culture per se, but is using its connotative motif to illustrate questions around presentness and balance in times of disorientation. Partly a response to our analogue and digital arenas becoming amalgamated in the flow of out / inpouring data until the differentiation between the two gets confused. Memory glitches occur from what is personally lived to what is lived by others through our filters.

By enabling the viewer to visually traverse styles and content in a similar way one might traverse space (web or wave, analogous or digital, inside or out), this exhibition asks whether disorientation, hellish perhaps in thought, is in actuality a harnessable and soon-to-be comforting factor in our material evolutionary progression. This show provokes collapse between usually distant fields like biography and technology, fact and fiction, private and public, all bouncing along the crest of a continuous flux of exchange.

ZINE: To accompany this exhibition, Laurence Owen has created a zine accessible only through a QR code embedded within some of the physical works in the show.

For this zine, an extended array of voices have also been invited to contribute texts.

This collection of writing varies hugely in its approach on tackling the expansive topic Owen assigned to the invitees, focusing on how notions around surfing are defined (from literal waves to the web, the stock market, to inward meditation). Throughout the pages, the writing offered is given in the varying forms of a Haiku, poetry, short essays, observational writing and philosophical musings.

This has resulted in an eclectic accumulation of voices which, by proxy, may also help the reader metaphysically traverse—as if they might their own wave—in and out of subjective and objective orientation from the writing styles and content, orbiting around this lynchpin of “the surf”. This zine contributes to viewing the addition of writing as an expansion of the shows’ premise rather than simply as a descriptive tool for the work in front of us. The contributing words are an artwork upon which to ride between the domains of the visual and the literary.