True Wood – Neil Taylor

In a mighty green landscape a seed was saved from a juicy ripe fruit. The seed remained dormant and fertile until placed in a dead mans mouth, and in the fullness of the moment this seed quite naturally grew into a tree, which was latterly and laterally planked. Thick planks, like beams, True Wood.

This story for some is historicaly correct and it spans the full course of time as we conceive it; and consequently provides for us a link to the ‘garden’. True Wood is thus the arbiter and mediator for this narrative.

For our current exhibition at Campbell Works, Neil Taylor explores haptic resonance through his project True Wood. In waymarking the devotional fetishisation borne on the Legend of the True Cross and its artefacts, the splinters become manifestations of a kind of sexualised desire in which gratification becomes linked by an abnormal degree to the veneration of a physical device. Likening this fervour to the behaviour and pilgrimages found within the contemporary art world, True Wood invites us to explore the question ‘what do we want these objects to do for us’?

True Wood, will showcase a significant new body of work including painting, printmaking and sculpture. This installation extends Taylor’s interests in the curatorial interpretation of cultural artefacts, and the critical analysis of the social conditioning and assumption they bring to bare.

The show will occupy all three galleries at Campbell Works, and be accompanied by a full colour 48 page, publication with commissioned texts by Glen Neath and Pascaline Monier.

According to a Chord of Wood. An open forum round table discussion with guests to include a Cardinal, a Carpenter, a Sinner and a Judge.