Jonathan Callan
Most of my work is derived from a fascination with materiality. I'm interested in fluff, dirt, dust. I'm interested in things breaking down. I'm interested in that which cannot be said but can only be shown. Most objects to me are not real until I can find what is inside.
Something seems to be materializing from the black cover of a book, like a genie from a bottle. Jonathan Callan (1961, United Kingdom) hammered the map of Antarctica out of the book More Secrets of the Dead by Hugh Miller. The English explorer Robert Scott still lies buried there in the ice with his unfortunate crew. Climate change is changing the shape of Antarctica unrecognizably. The ice caps are melting, and although snow continues to fall it cannot keep pace with the melting of the glaciers.
Callan plays in his work with the limitations of language and uses text – books, cards and photographs – as his most important source material. Callan grew up in the strongly literary British culture, in which he developed his own fascination for the expression of things beyond description in language. His sometimes violent, often obsessive way of working – in which the source material is torn, reconstructed and sometimes almost destroyed – emphasizes the physical aspect of the object and gives the work a meaning that transcends language.
