Tony Humbleyard is an artist whose work engages with site, collaboration and seeks to engage with social, psychological and physical space, to understand the ‘UseHistories’ of place and how they inform the urgencies of now. Exploring what it means to live an embedded relationship to place. He has lived and worked on Unst since 2005 engaged in a process of Deep Listening and a sustainable Social Art practice. He works within walking, cycling , kayaking distance of the Shorestation, inviting others into this ecology to collaborate and to develop a sustainable engagement through ongoing projects and residencies.
Tony uses random journeys, direct experience and the gathering of found objects. Constructing sculptures, interventions and poetic statements. Seeking out the patterns and continuities, the connections between our internal and external geographies. Exploring the perceptual landscapes that frame our actions in the world. As experience becomes increasingly commodified, his work is a reclamation of being present in any given place. Using space itself as an element that conjures form and narrative, a way of testing this present moment and our relationship to it.
‘Rock, fences, cloud and houses/ marks in a landscape/ looking for the continuities/ an alchemical gathering of found objects and direct experience/the space between thoughts/ liminal places/ dissident voices carried in the wind/ new ecologies ebb and flow….
Abandoning guidebooks/maps/signs in favour of wandering/direct experience. The ‘found object’ offers an aesthetic of things imperfect and impermanent, a simplicity of form. Marked by time, eroded by the elements, artefacts of our past and present. In engaging with the past I don’t seek to romanticize it, but to see it as waymarker to possible futures. Often my final sculptures arise from the relationship between different objects/materials, an intuitive process unfolding over many months and many journeys.
https://www.axisweb.org/p/tonyhumbleyard/
