I,ve been exploring some new materials this summer.

£1 shops & markets  are full of very cheap plastic imports,

domestic items for house,garden, beach or picnic.

These have become involved with some artificial flowers &

some cheap  chinese dolls,

On the astro-turf,amoungst the picnic-ware, a garden of plastic delights is evolving.

Plant-life & plastic planting have been a re-occurring theme

(Look under "PLANTS" in "WORKS"

BELOW:

     These are at BROOMHILL SCULPTURE PARK at Muddiford,nearBarnstaple DEVON             Installed in the woodland Lake in May 2007& made from re-cycled water bottles & plastic cloches,they are" SPARKLING WATER PLANTS"

The Plastic Bottles endure the seasons in this Devon woodland                                                               as the sculpture  changes into "POND LIFE" Photos below;October 09

Seven Choughs landed on my roof last week,

Swooping & choughing up from the Zawn.

Pyrrhocorrax, phyrrhocorax

FIRE RAVENS,The National bird of Cornwall,until recently, extinct in the county.

A pair have nested successfully in a nearbyl sea cave for the last two years,

The first Choughs born in West Penwith for 150years,are pecking around in my yard!

British Helicopters plan to relocate to this wild coast,soon.

I hope they wont scare away these very rare birds?

(paintings in oil on canvas,David Kemp 2006)

Chough calling down my workshop stovepipe,August 5th. 2010

The Department of Reconstruction closed the exhibition "The Botallack Hoard" last Saturday 3rd July after a three month run,at the Royal Cornwall Museum. Many people enjoyed the show,& left some very encouraging comments in the visitors book. THANK YOU for your kind words!

In reply to several requests ,a better yesterday is still under construction,& no  new venues for the exhibition have yet been finalised.

  Work from both The Botallack Hoard , &Uncertain Instruments ,will be available for sale, hire & exhibition from the end of July.

 Some pieces from "Uncertain Instruments" will appear in the"STEAM PUNK" exhibition  in the Great Hall, The DISCOVERY MUSEUM Newcastle -upon Tyne, JULY13th -17th.

Admission free

Work is currently  in progress for a NEW collection , plant life from 

THE  GARDEN of  EARTHLY DELIGHTS

Work in progress July 2010

"Inside Cornwall" the posh  county magazine has an article  about the BOTALLACK HOARD in this June issue. Not in the art section, but three pages in Homes & Garden section,.Look under "Antiques".

Above; Trophy Wives

 Above:"Tears of the Profit"

GALLERY MagaZine,(May Issue) also gives a short but complimentary review,

& there is an exhibition review & some installation photos in Cornwalls on-line art Magazine www.artcornwall.uk

I have had a few requests asking if the work in the exhibition is for sale?YES, most of it is, a price list is avaliable at the museum desk.

Thank you  for the kind comments in  my exhibition visitors book, it was VERY good to get your feedback,please contact me via this website if you need more information or background,about any of the  work on show,or other projects & commissions.

above; "Virtual Pilgrimage"

Above:"Panicattack"

The exhibition runs for another month, CLOSING 3rd.July 2010

 Now in its third week,The Botallack Hoard is attracting some press reviews.

attached from Bert Biscoe in the Western Morning News,&from Frank Ruhrmund in the Cornishman.

 Theexhibition continues until the 3rd JULY

.(doors close@16.30)

The  Royal Cornwall Museum is in River Street.Truro's excellant "Park& Ride" buses will deliver you directly to the front doorstep  

WESTERN MORNING NEWS April 27th 2010

TIMELINE.........10.15.53; 1o. 4. 3932

SITE...................Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro,SW Peninsula

SUBJECT..............Unidentified objects,"BOTALLACK HOARD"

The Department seeks information about these artefacts, recently arriving from your time,            & currently on display in the museum.

Please can you identify any of these  fragments,or help to establish their function & provenance ? 

THE DEPARTMENT of RECONSTRUCTION  "Building a better Yesterday"

Artefact11/742  site 28a    levels 11-12

Artefact 3301 site 28B  level 22d

Artefacts 4215-4226 Site 54G levels 51-54

The BOTALLACK HOARD opened Saturday at The Royal Cornwall Museum,Truro,& runs until the 2nd of July.

Thank you to the museum for hosting the exhibition & all the help & advice . It was a lot of FUN installing it !

 A very big thank you to Laura Ratcliffe, the VERY efficient exhibitions officer& all the friendly & helpful staff.

Thank you ,too to George,my right hand man, & volunteers Jaine & Sylvia,who worked very hard to present  these  time-stained  & grubby items from the future!

The Customs House Gallery in South Shields was certainly instrumental in pulling a wide audience into this exhibition,part of their popular programme  of Art Theatre & Cinema for the South Tyneside community.

The gallery counted 2o,000   visitors  to the exhibition over the Christmas & New Year period.

Some excerpts from the visitors book:-

   "Absolutely worth risking a parking fine for"                                                                                                        "It made me too scared to walk through into the cinema"                                                                                "Watch it, shake it, it was lol! "                                                                                                                                      "More like the weapons of mass destruction from the terrorist George W. Bush"                                "It actually made me laugh,which is quite a feat!"

Certain  sculptures from Uncertain Instruments   will be at the STEAM PUNK exhibition at the Discovery Museum, Newcastle-upon-Tyne in July.

UNCERTAIN INSTRUMENTS  will be available for hire & tour again in September .                                                                 

I am often asked  by students where I find my raw materials.

I have been collecting Cornish junk for over thirty years, The sort of  things I find, &where I find them,  have changed in ways which reflect how some things have changed in Cornwall, over the last four decades.

The country side was a working landscape & a much scruffier place, back then. Farmers rarely threw anything away completely,"in  case it came in useful".Every farm had its dump,tucked away in some field corner or piece of woodland, materials saved for "CODGING"the Cornish art of make & mend.

Abandoned cars lay burnt out on desolate moortop sites. Rural lay-byes were  littered with piles of junk & debris,dumped by fly-tippers. The ruined mines lay derelict, their shafts  choked with the carcasses of busted machines. The beaches carried a daily tide of plastic & pollution .

One of my earliest "finds" from this "early period" was on a wild moortop site, close to some ancient standing stones. Here, near a modern communications mast,I discovered an elaborate engine casting, rusting out amoungst a pile of broken granite. The juxtaposition of these objects,which spanned thousands of years of human activity,prompted the idea of a future archeologist ,discovering the ruins of a vanished civilisation.

Times change, & we change with them. Few people today can be unaware of our fragile relationship with our environment? We are trying to clean our act up,the Environmental Agencies are doing a thorough job of tidying up the countryside. Many places have been designated"areas of outstanding natural beauty",and the post-industrial sites have become World Heritage Sites,protected by UNESCO.

But anywhere there are  people ,there is junk, & I have found it lurking in new places.

                "There is nothing more beautiful than the chance encounter of an umbrella & a sewing machine on a dissecting table" wrote Isodore Ducasse, the Conte de Lautreamount,in the 19th century, a remark much quoted by the Surrealists ,fifty years later.  

 More than a century later,sewing machines are regularly encountering a multitude of domestic appliances,on scores of tables,on sports fields throughout Cornwall.The landscape is temporarily strewn with the detritus of our throwaway  society. At the Car Boot Sale,unwanted artefacts &obsolete technology from the "middle period" are available  in exchange for a few  pence,for collection.

Solar Mask, Glasgow Museums 1991

Cornwall continues to change, developing Information Technologies  offer new sites where socities detritus can be found. Although the "hard " copies may soon be obsolete in Hyperspace,the internet provides the means of locating unwanted artefacts.                              Facilitated by E-Bay & other online "sites",some of the exhibits, included in the" Botallack Hoard"(at the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, from 10th April) were delivered to my door by the postman.

The flickering electronic technology is opening another horizon, & possibilities for a new future for Cornwall ?

"finger-dance of the sparking beads", collection.David Kemp

R

RELICS,ARTEFACTS & GOD-DOLLIES FROM THE CONSUMER CULTS THAT THRIVED ON THE SOUTH WEST PENINSULA  TOWARDS THE END OF THE SECOUND MILLENIUM

The Museum has invited the Department of Reconstruction to display items from a collection unearthed from a variety of Late Iron Age sources,ruins, middens& other sites of human occupation.

A puzzling diversity of  artefacts will be exhibited,offering glimpses       of a resourceful people who developed a technology that reflected their dreams.

The functions of these objects remains open to speculation. Re-assembling this jigsaw of fragments from the past has been largely guesswork,informed by the myths & legends  from that fabulous age. Lacking any documentary evidence, few clues survive that shed any light on the fate of this advanced culture.

The exhibition,at the ROYAL CORNWALL MUSEUM, River Street TRURO

,will run fromAPRIL 10th---JULY  3rd.2010

DEPARTMENT of RECONSTRUCTION "BUILDING A BETTER YESTERDAY"

My workshop is a derelict mine building,out on the Tinners Coast,near St,.Just.

Twenty years ago, Geevor mine closed,ending several thousand years  of tin mining in the area.

The mines had  quickly fallen into ruins, their shafts choked with debris & scrapped machinery.

A friend, working on the maintenance staff at Geevor ,watched a mechanical digger burying a pile of redundant miners boots , & gave me a shout,I drove over & filled my pickup  with the discarded boots, not knowing what I might do with them.

This discarded footwear was to become THE HOUNDS OF GEEVOR

"Relics of a vast subterranean workforce that rarely saw the light of day, each of these Hounds fed up to  three & a half families(seven boots per dog).Released from their underground labours, they now wander the clifftops, looking for a proper job "

.....& as good luck would have it, they got one.

Cornwall County Council,in conjunction with Kerrier District & Redruth Town Councils, commissioned me to cast eight  hounds in bronze. Fittingly ,bronze is an alloy of Tin & Copper,,the valuable commodity that the owners of the boots were  excavating from the bowels of the earth.

The TINNERS HOUNDS now stand in TATTY SQUARE, on FORE STREET in REDRUTH

REDRUTH, once the "capital " of Cornish Tin Mining,was once a wealthy town, built from the miners labours.Local famalies,until recently supported by the skills & hardwork  of those who laboured Underground,will recognise this industrial footwear.

These working men ,s boots have become shopping  street sculptures, & a light hearted tribute to the Cornish miners,  for their grandchildren  to cuddle & climb upon.