Ben Jeans Houghton creates work in sculpture, installation, film, photography, drawing, writing and performance . He has exhibited internationally in Germany, Greece, Japan, North Africa, South East Asia, and the USA, whilst regularly exhibiting in the UK with organisations such as BALTIC, SpaceInBetween, CIRCA Projects, Globe Gallery, MEXICO Gallery and CORNERHOUSE.
With Matthew Giraudeau he is a founding member of the ARKA Group; a fluid collective of creative collaborators who aim to make scientific and philosophical concepts tangible to a wider audience through the delivery of innovative and poetic Visual Art.
Ben recently completed Stilllife a short film for Channel Four (UK), REM (Paradoxical Sleep) a participatory installation at BALTIC 39 (UK), Set design for Susan Sontag’s play ‘Alice In Bed’ at Stephenson Works (UK), a piece of fiction ‘Coping With Theandor’ for Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK) as well as ‘You Are Here’ an exhibition exploring spiritualism and narrative at Globe Gallery (UK).
Statement
blinks slow like hands clapped, you stub your toe, and try not to think
For me Art is a means of discovery, a way to enter the dense strata of human knowledge and experience, returning with a thing to be seen in a new light. My practice is polymathic, explored and delivered in various media including sculpture, installation, film, photography, drawing, performance and writing. I see my work as a research practice, based on the discovery and dissemination of information through new visual synergies; employing entrenched systems of understanding and taking them beyond themselves in order to uncover alternate ways of understanding the world and human experience. My practice is located within an extensive and ongoing discourse on the role and potential of art as a fluid and empirical system to explore, discover and unveil poetic or ‘Ecstatic Truths’ (Werner Herzog) i.e. truths which may be suffused with subjectivity, mystery and uncertainty.
At the heart of my practice is an investigation of the objects and ideas from the phenomenal world which surrounds us and the narratives or conceptual frameworks by which we attempt to decode, rationalise and understand them. My work manifests in various forms according to the inherent properties of the ideas pursued; Taxonomy through collections, the nature of perceived reality through film, historicism and narrative through text and images. Throughout my investigation of all these ideologies and modes of communication there is a consistent endeavour to rupture the finite boundaries of those concepts; an inquisitive undoing of explicable reality in order to creatively reveal something outside of both language and explanation. My work is not an interest illustrated but a means to afford others different ways of seeing beneath, beyond or within received and axiomatic understanding of reality. I work to puncture the habitual momentum of perception and to reveal the wonder, oddity and lineage of the structures we rely on; our senses, our cognition, our knowledge.
Core to my practice is the use of art as a means for underlining, stretching or compressing the viewer’s experience of time in order to invite contemplation and awareness of the present moment and themselves within it. This serves to affirm the reciprocal relationship between artwork and audience and the individual viewer’s relationship to the work as active agents in the construction and translation of meaning. My aims are equivocal to those of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chris Marker and Werner Herzog; to abate apathy, reveal elements inherent in each chosen subject that may at once confound and shed light on something fundamental and to offer a reflexive experience of understanding.
Biography
Ben Jeans Houghton. Born 1984, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Uk
Ben Jeans Houghton creates work in sculpture, installation, film, photography, drawing, writing and performance. He has exhibited internationally in Germany, Greece, Japan, North Africa, South East Asia, and the USA, whilst regularly exhibiting in the UK with organisations such as BALTIC, SpaceInBetween, CIRCA Projects, Globe Gallery, MEXICO Gallery and CORNERHOUSE.
With Matthew Giraudeau he is a founding member of the ARKA Group; a fluid collective of creative collaborators who aim to make scientific and philosophical concepts tangible to a wider audience through the delivery of innovative and poetic Visual Art.
Ben recently completed Stilllife a short film for Channel Four (UK), REM (Paradoxical Sleep) a participatory installation at BALTIC 39 (UK), Set design for Susan Sontag’s play ‘Alice In Bed’ at Stephenson Works (UK), a piece of fiction ‘Coping With Theandor’ for Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK) as well as ‘You Are Here’ an exhibition exploring spiritualism and narrative at Globe Gallery (UK).
