RETURN

THE NIGHT AND THE FIRST SCULPTURE
Alexander Mourant

Folium, 2024
ISBN 978-1-914552-90-8 Hb

Inventive chap is our Mr Mourant. This, his first book, consists of graphic black and white photographs of sculptures made from construction materials such as pallets, greenhouse glass panels, timber battens, ladders and stones, spot-lit at night inside a barn at his parents' farm in Jersey. The sculptures are made to be photographed, disassembled, and refashioned for the next image. Lit as they are, they appear sharply delineated as lines and tonal blocks; many have a minimalist formal elegance. Mourant himself appears in a number, including a Muybridge-like sequence in which we see the artist building a tower of pallets. Dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, with white trainers, arms and face, he becomes a graphic element in his own formal design, moving around, furiously at work. A strange comedy.
            This kind of work might normally be made in a studio. But as Mourant explains, he made the work while confined at home during lockdown in 2021 after graduating from the RCA, forced by circumstances to make use of whatever was to hand. The agricultural setting might seem incongruous, but it – alongside the pictures of the artist at work – provides a salutary reminder, written into the work itself, that all artworks are made by the physical labour of flesh-and-blood people with life histories under specific circumstances. This writing-in might be commonplace in overtly autobiographical art, but is less so otherwise.

            Mourant seems eager to direct and fix the meanings of his work. The book comes with a key: glass means image, pallet means place, wood means knowledge and so on. Image titles are interpretive. Sometimes they refer to what Mourant thinks the sculptures look like: 'Train Carriages (Stationary)', 'Snakes and Ladders'. Elsewhere they are more grandiose and obscure: 'Heavy is the Image that Stands Between Place'. This belongs to a picture of a sheet of glass supported on battens between two upright pallets. The titles suggest determined conceptualising on Mourant's part, but they risk blotting out any chance that the images will resonate for viewers who come with their own interests and perceptions.