1. Brian Gibson
Between thought and expression
Context
Residency
2010

2. Context
• History does not merely touch on
language, but takes place in it.
Theodor Adorno

3. Two things happening
at the same time
• News of another Neolithic site next to
Stonehenge has refocused my earlier ideas of
incorporating Semacode into the landscape of the
South West . I have a deep affection for Avebury ,
to walk around the stones is to connect with the
past and the land. Connections of time and place
... I was born and grew up very close to Hadrians
Wall, as children we walked and played on the
wall as part of our daily lives, it was not bound as
some part of a museum. Avebury for me holds a
sense of past and present co-existing within the
same space .

4. Avebury

5. Avebury

6. Bath

7. Context
• Words are but symbols for the
relations of things to one another
and to us; nowhere do they touch
upon absolute truth. Friedrich
Nietzsche

8. Colour Code 1

9. Colour Code2

10. Clour Code 3

11. Colour Code

12. • Soon silence will have passed into legend.
Man has turned his back on silence. Day after
day he invents machines and devices that
increase noise and distract humanity from the
essence of life, contemplation, meditation.
Jean Arp

13. Wire code

14. Code wall

15. St Ives

16. Wood code

17. Art is a foreign language
• There is something about words and their
connection to the past, how they are rooted in
our childhood , past down to us . I am thinking
about the words we inherit and the words we
dont use , the space between words and how
art can be like speaking without words…
another language.

18. Drawing panel

19. Drawing panel

20. Drawing panel

21. Drawing panel

22. Drawing panel

23. Drawing panel

24. Taunton

25. Taunton

26. Taunton

27. Taunton

28. Tower code

35. Mother

36. Mother

37. Mother

38. Matrix code

39. Constructions

47. Glastonbury

48. • Photography has always played an important role in
my practice . One area I have been working in is with
inherited images/old family photographs that have
been passed down to me. Using digital software, I
have been able to take people from these
photographs ( known and unknown) and re-set them
into new environments that I have photographed.
• The process of taking people from their original
environment and putting them into a new setting
creates a shift from their original identity which, in
part, has been defined by time and place. I see this
method of reconstructing the image as a way of
revealing archetypal characteristics.

49. Codex

50. Codex

51. • I think the tree is an element of
regeneration which in itself is a
concept of time. Joseph Beuys

53. Codex

54. Codex

55. Something old something new
• I am interested in the marriage between new
and old technologies. How new developments
can connect us to the past in a meaningful and
fruitful way.

56. Cross Stitch

57. Emma’s Cross stitch

58. Emma’s Cross stitch

59. Line

60. Maze

61. Code

62. Context
• There is no such thing as an empty space or an
empty time. There is always something to see,
something to hear. In fact, try as we may to
make a silence, we cannot. John Cage

63. Brian Gibson

64. Broadcast

65. Context Blog