Jason Farrow
​
Moonlighting
​
Comber Street Studios, Paddington
​
9-10th April, 2022
​
“ I was walking around the city a lot, waiting for something to click. On a rainy day, a lone figure caught my attention. Time kept passing. Spent some time thinking about the journeys of Ian Fairweather. Look, there's another one. Fell down a set of stairs at the train station. Don't rush. Sumatra. India. Living without appeal. Took up part-time work in a bronze foundry. Found number three. I wonder if I'll ever see that block of marble again? Shouldn't have left it out there. But sometimes, things do come back to you.”
-Jason (2017-2022)
​
​
TANGIBLE TIME
Lizzie Thomson
Moonlighting. That unofficial work
that happens away from the public eye.
Head bowed, quietly working
deftly with your hands,
literally chipping away
at this incredible body of work
for five years.
In this impatient world of instant gratification,
de-skilling, mechanical reproduction
and expendable trash,
you choose marble.
Four big slabs of it.
And you sculpt it by hand.
Don’t rush, you say.
It’s a pretty radical process
for the time we live in.
Investing years of your life
in a single process; a single material.
Carving human expression into rock
while also sensing, feeling and listening
to its rock-solid material limits,
its power and energy.
It might sound crazy
to speak of a rock’s energy
but this rock is special.
It’s old. Real old.
190 million years old.
Transformed into marble
from limestone, inside a mountain
while dinosaurs were thudding
with their feet on its surface.
This rock is Jurassic.
When I see these sculpted figures,
I want to touch their bodies with my hands
to find out how you have made this rock appear so soft,
so malleable, so bodily and alive.
Do they breathe when I blink?
I want to sink into their soft fleshy world.
But then I zoom back out and see these figures
echoed in a parallel world,
in another ancient craft, another medium altogether.
Same physical postures, but a different time,
formed through the age-old process of lost-wax casting.
The blistering heat, the pouring, the dripping
intensify the feelings of these postures
into more troubled, weathered expressions of time.
Cascading liquid solidified, thoughts and eyes downcast.
These figures seem to be descending back
into the earth in solitary decay.
I want to cradle their fall as they exit.
Six figures; two worlds of three.
Sitting in quiet contemplation, deep in thought,
consumed in those soundless moments
of private, interior, infinite worlds.
Their bodies are filled with humility and dignity,
and a mix of pain and contentment.
Can they feel us watching them?
The average time a visitor stands and contemplates
an artwork in a museum is around 20 seconds.
But I could stand and watch these works forever,
feeling their quiet presence and embodied time
from the Jurassic era till the perpetual now.
Printed on the occasion of Jason Farrow’s exhibition Moonlighting, Comber St Studios, 2022
​
​