- Venue
- The Bun House
- Location
- London
Having stepped around a police cordon with a white creped figure moving somewhere at its centre, I realise that yes, I am in Peckham. I have come to experience the expectation of an impending storm in Andrew Humber’s first solo showing since the completion of his masters. Entering the comfort of The Bun House pub, I pass through a time of heavily patterned carpets and solid wooden panelling, to find a door marked with a bronze plaque; ‘PRIVATE’. An unusual place for an exhibition in a public house and yet not unlike the London art scene to keep itself a pace apart. Through the door, down a corridor accompanied by the sound of something lashing on the corrugated roof, I enter a small dark room.
A carriage style wheel is mounted on a frame that has a small piece of graph paper masking taped to the backing. On top of the wheel is a miniature model tree set in relief against the papers grid. A weighted cord hangs form the centre of the room. Pulling the cord sets the wheel in motion and a light just above the tree starts to flicker. The tree begins to move and sway. The strobe is capturing moments in the motion of a dozen trees that are spaced around the rim of the wheel. The sense of an impending storm, the anticipation, is aggravated by a need to pull the cord so as to push the revolutions ever faster. The wheel randomly chooses which way to spin reminiscent of the ‘wheel of fortune’ tarot card; what goes up must come down, what fills must empty, so the world turns and us with it. You are at once obliged to start the wheel in motion, while being set back from the scene, the possible direction of the wheel and the outcomes of the bourgeoning storm. The irony involved in being the instigator of the storm, could give the work a simplistic man versus nature reading, but it is too intimate and I suspect not wholly anticipated and from that unforced position, it is poetic and beautiful. Likewise the work transcends the presence of its mechanisation, too often such works can become so engaged with the apparatus of their making, they loose the possible outcomes that this work possesses.
Returning to the corridor and sounds from above, another door leads to an outdoor cavity, a metal ladder, the sound of a fan and a glimpse of a silver balloon above. Mounting the ladder leaves you standing on the buildings roof, a spectator to the inflation and deflation of the crinkled silver surface of a possible weather balloon. The fan below turns on intermittently facilitating the balloons movement, sliding up and down a wooden dowel. Standing on a roof staring up into the sky, I am again struck by the poetics of the moment.
Back on the street, all seems normal and calm, there is no sign of the police cordon, what ever happened has been logged and filed away. The streets have returned to their usual state where all things are possible.
