Sculpture & Environmental Art

Thomas Newton (He/Him/They)

THERE IS AN ARTIST WALKING AROUND GLASGOW, TRYING TO COMMUNICATE HIS INTERACTIONS WITH THE CITY’S DEMARCATION THAT IS ATTEMPTING TO MISGUIDE HIS GAZE. HE DEVELOPS RESEARCH FROM THE FENCES. AROUND THE FENCES. RESEARCH TO LOCATE THE FENCES AND SO HIS VOICE AND SO OUR RECEPTION. OUR PERCEPTION OF AND SO THROUGH THE FENCES. HE WANTS US TO RELOCATE FROM SPECTATOR TO SPECTRE, WHERE AT ONCE WE WILL BE SUSPENDED, AND FREE TO HONESTLY CURATE MEMORIES OF RECENT FUTURES. HE IS RELOCATING INTO THE MODERN FRESCOS OF CIVIC DEVELOPMENT, WHERE AN INFRASTRUCTURAL[ISED] VAULT OF THE SKY, OR DOME OF HEAVEN, IS EMERGING THROUGH THE BLUE HUES OF WEATHERPROOF PAINT. AND FROM THE SANDSTONE, GARGOYLES AND DIORAMAS ARE INTERRUPTING HIS CRITIQUE OF HIS WORK.

Contact
tommynewton@mac.com
t.newton1@student.gsa.ac.uk
Thomas Newton
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Series
“Smithson’s Humpty Dumpty” from Underbelly of Heaven Variations, in Many Mvts., in No Order, 2023
“Incising” from Underbelly of Heaven Variations, in Many Mvts., in No Order, 2023
“Gene”
“Underbelly’s Store”
“Fencing, Fencing”, 2023-Ongoing

"Gene" from Underbelly of Heaven Variations, in Many Mvts., in No Order, 2023

“Smithson’s Humpty Dumpty” from Underbelly of Heaven Variations, in Many Mvts., in No Order, 2023

Thinking near-by the work, a sardonic popculturalist may say,
‘I’m standing on the shoulders of referable coolness. It is another dessert daydream drive-by. liberation at sunset; I’m riding a rise to ether. Yes, waking dreams. I have found a silly, dioramic entrance to spectral infrastructure.’
– Sardonic moreover – in relation to the motorway crashing through the window.

“I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes—

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

 

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

Even the dearest that I loved the best

Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

 

I long for scenes where man hath never trod

A place where woman never smiled or wept

There to abide with my Creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie

The grass below—above the vaulted sky.” 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43948/i-am

 

"Smithson's Humpty Dumpty" from Underbelly of Heaven Variations, in Many Mvts., in No Order, 2023

"Smithson's Humpty Dumpty" from Underbelly of Heaven Variations, in Many Mvts., in No Order, 2023

"Smithson's Humpty Dumpty" from Underbelly of Heaven Variations, in Many Mvts., in No Order, 2023

“Incising” from Underbelly of Heaven Variations, in Many Mvts., in No Order, 2023

This graven thing has an interchangeable wax top, stylus, and steel necklace.  It’s stained with a homemade mix and favours fridge-magnets over farewells…

"Incising" from Underbelly of Heaven Variations, in Many Mvts., in No Order, 2023

For Sale: Price on Request

"Incising" from Underbelly of Heaven Variations, in Many Mvts., in No Order, 2023

"Incising" from Underbelly of Heaven Variations, in Many Mvts., in No Order, 2023

"Incising" from Underbelly of Heaven Variations, in Many Mvts., in No Order, 2023

“Gene”

"Gene"

"Gene"

For Sale: Price on Request

"Gene"

"Gene"

“Underbelly’s Store”

The are some pauses in the audio, where Soundcloud has seen it appropriate to censor my flipping and blinding. Quite. Write.

"Underbelly's Store"

"Underbelly's Store"

"Underbelly's Store"

“Fencing, Fencing”, 2023-Ongoing

‘You can engineer me, but you can’t imagineer me!’

Can’t you see that that’s not that. That’s not really there. And we can’t look past it – and all the while he’s saying, ‘I’m not passive, we ARE, and will be, here’ and I say, “Well… you actually aren’t. Yes, materially once, but obviously now, not so. You see, or you don’t see, you seem to have paused the pulse of children who played here, and your PVC lips purse because you’re smug. Because as I tell you you’re smug, you’re getting away with something and hiding it further and you know that from where I stand, raring and hungry to look through the doors of the canteen beneath my feet, you will, afore I remember where I stand, remain at once A POSTHUMOUS AND POTENTIAL PIN UP.  The bad kind. The sad kind. The unkind false-projection-of-a-future-that-never-was-nor-ever-will-be-remembered kind.
Because, when I walk near-by you, knowing I’ll end up having to recite near-by this  impressionability later, I’ll make sure fridge magnets like you are forgotten – for your material sake, at least, at last. Because, really, you aren’t there. When your ply comes down and I stumble from your weatherproof render, of a cyclist, and an employee having lunch (that’s equally immaterial), laying beneath a month-old-thin-layer of mud, above, no doubt, more recent rotten dregs of forgotten wallpaper, the truth of the future site is being expelled by your projection. The trees are leafless, and the bird is probably in Lisbon or North Africa by now.
What, I admit, I do like, is your blue mesh. Because with that I can remind myself of some of modern industrial architecture’s accidental slip. I speculate, of course, but we all should speculate, of course, because where we can interpret a dome of heaven or vault of the sky (he says nostalgic for guaranteed permanence) in the blue belly of overpasses and camouflage of fucking massive Amazon® warehouses, we can see, courtesy of invisibility, the location I want my reception to lobby.  So yeah, it seems that these sorts of locations may be the entrance to the suspended place you, being demarcation, demarcates. Of course, for the overpasses belly-sake I’d suggest the following model for interaction to take place on a sunny day with few if not no clouds. Otherwise,  a re…locating and de…postulating slug of a motorway becomes very much visible, again. And again. And again.

So … blue can be angelic; a revision on masters’ painting formless eternities in chapels. And my forgetting can be acumen. I should throw a bottle of wine at you and watch as borders become fluid and boundless. Ha! Demarcation’s loitering in the trendy redefinition of temporality. I’ll interpret again that I can imagine you, a fence, anew, for a cheap metaphor (no longer my heed), warped in the same direction of my recitation. Shapeless and warming in my palms; dislocated and honest.

I’m going to take my shoes off and, do as lecherously as an artist I enjoy does.  When you whisper, ‘Hark, home is where the hard is!’ and, ‘The distance of this now transparent demarcation makes ‘art ponder alternative haptic coaxing!’ I see, with a great malady, picturesque views in the manner of a lost cadre of sand stone gargoyles. Now, I’m going to mediate medievally your shroud, part PVC part steel, part phantasmatic, mostly hard. Demolition site fences should be replaced with motes, but veiled in some kind of malleable meniscus, that moves underfoot, and dense enough, of course, so as not to become hazardous and unapproachable.  From here on in, I’ll think of you as a somatically navigable custard. But transparent.  So, I can excavate your pith more joyfully.
SIRIUS-ly though, we are the vanguards of the many-headed shift into playful liminality ignored in development contracts; boundless light-speed. We will occupy the auditorium free from audit.  (It’s my first time going there too, don’t worry).  Spectator cum Spectre, we will curate our own honesty. The broken-bottle-glass is now a couple of atolls in an awoken sea of living boarders. We must cool the molten seams to create a sarcophagus.

From sandstone-shoulders [I just saw John Smith’s black box in Oxenholme, Lake-District]:
The mesh seems to be as migratory as my forgetting. Remaining lucid, Angels, now drawn under , have risen from ceilings, muddying blue, resting and assured by the fuzzy ‘dirt’ of public gaps. We all missed it very much.

I will continue to follow these iconoclastic interpretations by composing an angelic-infrastructuralist.

I find myself thinking about museum storerooms.

Dioramic displays that have been verified by zoologists, animate and give life to the archive, to the collection. They attempt to round and  so emaciate the deception of theft.  It is an old trick, of shrines and the artists immortal fiend, where purgatory, for a stuffed and mounted sea gull, is PVA, sand, and waxed card. Childish and very revisable. I suppose that they are memories of a recent future – one that is no less real than our own projection projects. And, certainly no less true than pulpited saints caught visiting us delicates, under celestial skies painted by a team of boys that denies masonry.
It’s pretty cool being this close to eternal landscapes as vast as my forgetfulness; forever changeable. Incised, and erased. Incised and erased. Dug and brushed and plinthed.  Soft and precariously permanent.

The storeroom’s stillness is analogous to cathedral ceilings, and overpass bellies, where life sees itself to surpass the vastness of air and vapours, allowing pews to give people a taste of heaven, if not realising it entirely. Posthumous space in the storeroom, however, is composed by PVA + sand dioramas, where a congregated movement of animals is petrified on MDF shelves. Suspended and still (unfortunately ) lifeless.

A bunch of actors, some more impressionable than others, are realising a cadre of gargoyles. A scene of limbo that is somewhere between
My forgetting and nostalgia,
Infrastructural camouflage,
And tumulus and heaven.
I suppose dioramas (for taxidermy) are not simply a sarcophagus but are more a shrine, with a static lens that speculates an unfamiliar realm as referable.
And the blue of bridges and civic interruptions, is a place to realise similarly – and to spectate spectrally.

The view is changing out there, and the sky is being rubbed smooth by the hard hands of employees, the motorway is the king and the worker’s his mares.
And all of the king’s mares braid’s edges are soft with palls of perspiration, the eddies of their change, can’t really pile together a tumulus,
Again.

Instead, a new body is forming, as honest to its fiction as my forgetting. The infrastructural construction realises my recitation! A pva and sand infrastructuralist occupies romantically, my recollections impressionability.
I think it wants to resemble Glasgow’s honey brick tenements.

Untitled #32, 2023 - Ongoing

Untitled #29 (M74), 2023 - Ongoing

Untitled #02, 2023 - Ongoing

Untitled #03 (M74), 2023 - Ongoing

Untitled #31, 2023 - Ongoing

Untitled #09 (M74), 2023 - Ongoing

#Untitled21, "Collection's Store"

Untitled #01, 2023 - Ongoing

Untitled #Glaswegian Hare(30), 2023 - Ongoing