Documentation
Statement of Matter
Artist
Roddy Hunter

Image © Roddy Hunter, Statement of Matter, 1999. Photo by Paul Couillard.


b. 1970, Scotland

Roddy Hunter is an artist, educator and writer based in York, England since 2007 where he is Head of Fine Arts at York St John University. He studied at the University of Glasgow before living and working in Kingston-upon-Hull as a member of Hull Time Based Arts between 1994-98 and in Totnes as Lecturer in Visual Performance and then later Director of Art at Dartington College of Arts between 1998-2007. He gained an MA (Contemporary Arts) from Nottingham Trent University in 1998. He is interested in aesthetics, pedagogy and the art of action, mainly in relation to social and urban realities. 

He works mainly in performance and installation arts practice. His work has featured at CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; trace: installaction artspace, Cardiff; Sculpture Square, Singapore; Werkleitz Gesselschaft, Törnitz; TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst Rotterdam; CCA, Tel Aviv; Site Gallery, Sheffield; Centro Galego De Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; Le Lieu, Québec; CAC, Vilnius; Ludwig Museum, Budapest. He has participated in festivals further throughout Europe as well as in North America, Asia and the Middle East.

Curatorial work includes: Art. What is it good for? (with Tracey Warr, Dartington, 2004), Span2 (with André Stitt, London, 2001) and Rootless ’97: The Nomad Domain (with Hull Time Based Arts, 1997). Critical writings include monograph essays on Alastair MacLennan, John Newling, and André Stitt. Numerous public lectures, talks and workshops have been given internationally. He is also presently Chair of the Turning Point Yorkshire and the Humber Interim Steering Group.

Performance
Statement of Matter by Roddy Hunter

FADO continues its 12-month duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with Scottish artist Roddy Hunter in Statement of Matter: Performance(s) of Indefinite Duration.

Hunter’s performance will begin at noon on June 2, 1999 and continue into sometime the following day. Evidence of the performance will be on view through to midnight on June 3, 1999.

Through his work, Hunter investigates and creates charged, complex environments. Using simple materials, he moves through and acts upon a space, mapping out territories and time periods, tracing and erasing interrelationships among himself, his audience, and whatever objects are present. For this performance, his primary materials will be an empty white room, two video monitors with live feeds, a large sack of flour and a roll of white gaffer tape.


Statement about Statement of Matter by Roddy Hunter:

This performance is one of an ongoing series of inherently interdisciplinary negotiations of anterior spaces, places and actions. This anteriority does not imply, however, that these exist in the past, that they are lost to us. Rather, these states of matter and being remain ‘before’ conceptions and perceptions of causal thinking and doing in linear time frames. As such we are in their midst and by uncovering them we realise participation in a new milieu where previously rigid forms are no longer assured.

In our climate of syntactical formalism, I propose that the actuation of installation, through its precise location of action as the site of both the perception and conception of the aesthetic matrix, provides a necessary undoing of any preexisting equation whereby language solely equals thought.
~Roddy Hunter, Some notes and sources toward a realisation of installation, 1999

Statement of Matter: Performance(s) of Indefinite Duration is one of a series of projects bearing the same title. In a manifesto for these works, Hunter writes: “Art has, for too long, operated as a formal ‘response’ to the world… The realisation of Performance Art… is… a realisation of the difference between uncovering and understanding (or translating)… [T]here is no thing to understand, or put an other way, it becomes impossible not to understand everything. When art is lived, so living is art; and when living is art, so art is lived.

Performance
Rencontre Performance

Presented by FADO in cooperation with Le Lieu in Québec City, as a satellite event of Le Lieu’s Rencontre internionale d’art performance et multimédia. This event was organized and curated by Sandy McFadden with the support of Istvan Kantor and Paul Couillard.

ARTISTS
Paul Couillard (Toronto)
Ed Johnson (Toronto)
Istvan Kantor (Toronto)
Louise Liliefeldt (Toronto)
Richard Martel (Québec)
Julie Andrée T. (Québec)
BMZ (Hungary)
Roddy Hunter (UK)
Tari Ito (Japan)
Dziugas Katinas (Lithuania)
Gustav Uto (Romania)
Hong O Bong (Korea)
Irma Optimist (Finland)
Hortensia Ramirez (Mexico)
André Stitt (N. Ireland)

Performance Yellow

This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?

Top Notes

yellow mandarin, mimosa

Middle Notes

honey, chamomile, salt

Base Notes

narcissus, guaiac wood, piss, beer