MERRIC BRETTLE: PSYCHOPOMP 2:POETRY OF THE MECHANICS
26.11.25 - 20.12.25
Installation images
Psychopomp 2 - The Poetry of Mechanics.
At the heart of my practice is an exploration of what it means to be an individual within our contemporary socio-cultural condition. With this in mind, I make two types of work. The first investigates what this condition ‘is’, and the second expresses my reflections on what it means to ‘be’ within it.
The first type of work therefore, investigates the social world we share, as I collect and remake bits of it that convey some ‘sense’ of it to me. These ‘bits’ are all images from the Internet, and the works I make from them are my Pattern Finding pieces. In these works I reverse engineer these sense/samples and explore how they ‘work’ on me.
It is by capturing the look of screen backlighting, for instance, that I come to understand our experiential relationship to a mechanised culture, and by making abstract pieces using colour pallets from advertising material, that I get an idea of a socio-cultural mood.
In these works, ‘I’ exist in their translation from sample image to object, and the ‘marks’ of my presence relate to ‘impression’ as opposed to ‘expression’.
While constructing these works is an ongoing process, there is another type that I make paral-lel to them. These are my Reflection pieces, and they express ‘what’ I considered this condition to be, ‘the way’ that I saw it, and ‘how’ I understood being within it at different times. In them I employ an expanding number of systems of being creative, in series, to explore my ideas.
In some of these system/series, for example, I add to pattern finding pieces and overlay them with other materials to express the personal relationship I had with them when I ‘found’ them. In others I join two or more samples to explore a resonance that express’ something else. In yet others I explore the materials, methods and images I found in my pattern finding works, as a kind of language through which to express my ideas. These systems/series are represented in the Liminal Object, Ritual Process and Sense Data works shown here.
In these works ‘I’ exist in them as samples, yet also in the choices that my system/series afford. Consequently, within them, the ‘mark’ of my presence is multiple, exists in layers, and expresses both impression and expression.
Contemplating the works in this exhibition, they are all ‘visual poems’ and as such they are all emotional and experiential responses to ‘being in the world’. In saying this however, their poetry probably lies just as much in the mechanics of the systems I use as in the surface image I construct.
With this in mind, I hope that the viewer reads the works formally as they would allow for the poetry in these mechanics to be seen. Consequently, I would like them to consider the works as experiential metaphors of they way that I as one individual came to terms with our strange new digitized and globalised condition.
It is as an experiential metaphor thus, that I hope for them to explore the systems I employ to make work, as they reflect those that we all use to understand reality itself. That they consider the levels of choice that these systems generate in the works, as they create a ‘space’ between the viewer and object for them to explore. And that they understand the ‘senses’ that they receive from the work themselves, as they are a product of not just my agency, but also of the worlds on me.
Seen in this way the poetry of this ‘rude mechanical’ lies in understanding my works as personal ‘flights of being’. The mechanics of my poetry understood as the systems I devise to explore the possibilities of my own creativity. And the beauty of these mechanics, as to me, these poetics of creativity, express the limits and possibilities of ‘being’ itself.
Merric Brettle, 2025
