A second initiative related to the physical artwork will be a publication. It is envisaged that such a publication would contain essays and commentary not only about the art works but the broader issues relating to the spaces we occupy. Mark was interviewed on-line in March 2001. Read that interview by going to http://www.dabra.com/digichat.html
It is hoped that debate will expand this list in a considered and perhaps provoking way. During the first showing of the new work in June/July 2001 there will be lectures and seminars based on the themes and issues of this work so if you feel that you'd like to contribute to the debate surrounding this project please email construct@reaction-graphics.fsnet.co.uk
In April 2001 Clare van Loenen, Keeper of Art, Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery wrote the following essay on Mark's work:
In our daily journeys, our routines there are a procession of buildings, events and details that blur at the corner of our consciousness. Mark Wood takes his camera, lifts these missed observations from obscurity and lines them up in a roll call of familiar spaces that one cannot quite place. There is a subdued, unsettling quality within these photographs that arises from a current of displaced features that runs through each sequence of seemingly calm constructed townscapes. One's sense of place can't quite gain a foothold, disorientated by incongruities. Remembered buildings set amongst the clutter of the city now stand proud against open, colourfully dramatic skies. A forgotten mine-shaft head rises quietly from behind a row of shops, in a context where once they were plentiful, while the shade of wished-for trees softens the form of a beleaguered cul-de-sac.
These lost pieces and remnants of places reconnect in Mark Wood's photographs to stand for that Midlands 'home' town and all it has been and what it has become. The remaining idiosyncratic signs that mark out small businesses and modern day social centres: the Post Office, Fish & Chip Shops and Curry Houses hint at the communities who still occupy these territories and the shrinking focus of their daily lives. It is in the detail, the dated shop graphics and tired window displays that one finds both an associated nostalgia and the desire for community renewal.
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