‘Even garbage is alluring because it informs us of human systems. Think how quickly something monkish becomes pornographic by association.’

English artist Helen Marten uses an internal, cryptic logic to unpick the binary relationship between question and answer. She then wads it with simulacra, showing the riddled possibilities of the endless associations between A and B, or even C and D and E. Ordinarily, she has done this through her sculptural and installation works. Through The Boiled in Between, however, Marten’s first work of fiction, the artist enmeshes her chaotic depictions of humanity into an abstract wordscape that floats and falls and gushes with observational intensity. With Modern Matter, the artist discusses this new extension of her practice, presented here alongside artworks inspired by the book, and an extract from the book itself.

Alexander Dixon’s work is capricious. It centres on the meeting place between the artificial and the natural, purposefully displacing the viewer by intersecting environmental planes to create new contextual confinements. In doing so, it allows for multiple spatial and temporal moments to converge, captured in photographs, and then conjoined beyond recognition and laid out on construction metals. According to cultural theorists Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, this merging of space and time, in relation to the conception of art, acts as a cultural carrier in creating transnational spaces that thematise, represent and become themselves ‘an object of experience.’ This multiplicity of experiential components transgresses the boundaries of rationale, and allows for the emergence of new perspectives, often using the tool of disruption.