Enso nest
The Self Isolation Residency
Dunoon Burgh Hall Gallery,
Dunoon, Scotland, 2021:

​Although I intended to appropriate the gallery’s existing hanging system as the primary material for this work, I was equally concerned that the installation articulate something of the gallery’s character and, more broadly, the ideological function of the gallery wall. Crucially, however, I did not want the work to reside on the walls in any conventional sense. Instead, I sought to develop a form that would operate simultaneously in two and three dimensions, both occupying the architectural volume and conceptually emerging from it. The installation was conceived as spatially embedded rather than surface-bound: a structure capable of directing attention differently depending on the viewer’s position, perception, and mode of engagement.

By extending the hanging lines horizontally from the wall-mounted rails toward the centre of the gallery, effectively reversing their intended function of vertical suspension, I was able to interlace them into a self-supporting, three-dimensional form. The resulting structure assumed a nest-like configuration, at moments suggestive of an enso in its circular continuity. Suspended above head height yet below the lighting rig, it occupied a liminal architectural zone. Through careful positioning of the lights, the structure was illuminated from above, casting layered, overlapping linear shadows onto the white walls. These projected “virtual drawings” operated as ephemeral wall works, activating the very surfaces the installation deliberately avoided physically inhabiting. Casting a shady enso all around the gallery walls. 

Temporality remained central to the project. As with much of my site-responsive practice, the experiential dimension was paramount. The work existed fully only within its specific spatial and temporal conditions. Removed from that context, what remains, photographs, diagrams, written accounts, serves merely as indexical residue, offering at best a partial and indirect trace of the lived encounter. 

Ultimately, Enso Nest functioned as both intervention and reflection: an exploration of how exhibition mechanisms can be reoriented to reveal their latent sculptural and conceptual potential. By destabilising the conventional relationship between artwork and wall, the installation invited a reconsideration of the gallery not as a neutral container, but as an active and generative participant in meaning-making. In foregrounding structure, light, and shadow as co-producers of the work, the piece sought to momentarily reconfigure the perceptual and spatial logic of the room, leaving behind not an object, but a heightened awareness of the conditions through which art is staged, encountered, and ultimately remembered.