Tate Gallery St Ives: Exhibition by Simon Starling

Our next task for the Contextual Module is to create a Virtual Exhibition linking it to one of the Series of Lectures from this term. Today I decided to take myself off to St Ives to visit the Tate Gallery and the Barbara Hepworth Museum. It was a beautiful day and I enjoyed the change of scene away from Plymouth.

The main exhibition at the Tate today, was a work by Simon Starling who won the Turner Prize in 2005. His art is seen as a cultural anthropology; he researches historical incidents and produces new narratives through sculpture, video, photography, slide projections and film. Throughout the exhibition he alludes to various histories in technology, science, geology and archaeology, social and political history. The work emphasises his interest in the interplay between culture and nature.

"Gallery 5" houses two pieces of marble called "The Long Ton"; one that he has imported in its original form from China, and the other weighing and looking the same as the original but which is an Italian Sculpted Stone which has been precision machined with data scanned from the larger Chinese stone. Starling's emphasis here is the monetary worth of the two pieces. He comments on the economics, authenticity and value to his art. The work is a balancing act. The two pieces are hung from the ceiling by a pulley system and sit in perfect equilibrium. The question is "Why is one piece worth more that the other?" They have the same market value even though the Chinese marble is twice the size of the Italian marble.

After spending an hour or so with Starling's Exhibition, I walked to the Barbara Hepworth Museum. I had visited the museum before, but it was an interesting comparison to Starling's work. Hepworth's sculptures are forms based on the landscape which share space with the land. There is no emphasis on value but the work, as I see it, is more about the aesthetics and the link between land and sculpture.

After viewing the work of Simon Starling, my first choice of the lecture to link with our Virtual Exhibition is "Production and Consumption." I have asked the rest of the group to make their choices so that we can decide which to use, and then I can start to work on the project set.

Image Courtesy of

http://www.allartnews.com/important-works-made-in-the-last-five-years-by-turner-prize-winner-simon-starling-at-tate-st-ives/