Callum Lovell Harrison

This place is a message…and part of a system of messages…pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here…
of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill…*

*Sandia National Laboratories, Trauth, K. M. and Hora, S. C. & Guzowski, R. V. (1993)
Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

Drawing on social theory and Achille Mbembe’s notion of Brutalism, the work ‘Decoy’ looks to the spatial and material organisation of our contemporary milieu and how these structures reflect and shape the bodies they contain within a culture of violent domination.

In looking to the undercurrents of the built environment and its by-products, the broader relationship between the human body and the environmental systems that have been built within a schema shaped by military, technological, and industrial structure is investigated. Recognisable forms of home or the natural world become suspect and troubled, and a consistent visual of cold grey matter dominates much of the images.
Alongside this, the inherent destructive nature of humanity is also at question – are we so seduced by our own ruin?

The title of this body of work, ‘Decoy’, is borrowed from the craft of Waterfowl Decoy’s, a hunting tool commonly known as a man-made object created to directly resemble a species of Waterfowl (Ducks) and dispersed into ponds to attract real birds by creating a false sense of safety and security. The models have origins as far back as the Nile of ancient Egypt, where they were hand-modelled from clay. From the 19th century onwards as they became popular in the west, they were carved from wood, and after World War II, canvas and plastic. Today, they are considered high-value collectable art pieces.

The less commonly known form of Waterfowl Decoy is a structure or site which functions under the same grounds of illusion, in this case within a spatial nature. On the contrary to singular handmade objects, these structures operate as meticulously constructed environments of deception. Within the decoy structure system, ducks are encouraged to naturally land on a calm large pond, known as ‘The Pool’, where other decoy ducks, or in some cases a genuine tame population of ducks, are already present. The lured ducks are then persuaded through the spatial arrangement into ‘Pipes’ of water filled ditches, covered with inescapable hoops of wood or iron and netting, that gradually become narrower.

Throughout this process, the decoymen hide behind screen-walls, watching their progress through peepholes.