Taking as a starting point the description of an exhibition project, the British artist reflects on the creative process, serendipity, and writing as an exploratory tool in conceiving and creating a work.
Woven Worlds (Some Notes on a Work in Progress) describes the development of an exhibition project on which Simon Starling is currently at work, recounting how an idea can spring from a particular circumstance or situation, the encounter with a place or setting, and trigger a process that comes to maturity through the creation of a work. While on the one hand, the text can therefore be seen as illustrating Starling's overall practice, which moves from “chance,” to investigation, to concrete incarnation as a finished piece, on the other it shows the role and significance that the practice of writing is assigned in his work. As the artist says, “giving linguistic shape to a thought process is a way to challenge and refine that thinking – to get to the bottom of what really matters”: and so writing is not merely a form of later reflection, but an important exploratory tool and gauge in the process of conceiving and creating a work.
Peep-Hole Sheet is a quarterly of writings by artists published by Mousse Publishing until 2016. Each issue is dedicated solely to one artist, who is invited to contribute with an unpublished text whose content is completely free in terms both of subject and format. The texts are published in their original language, with accompanying translations in English and Italian. Peep-Hole Sheet is meant for those who believe artists are catalysts for ideas all around us, and who want to read their words without any filter. Over time it aspires to build up an anthology of writings that might open new perspectives for interpreting and understanding our times.
Based on intensive research and (self-)experimentation, the works of Turner Prize winner Simon Starling (born 1967 in in Epsom, Surrey, lives and works in Copenhagen and berlin) works take the form of multipart installations that incorporate technological trappings, films, photography, objects, performance, and publications. With a sharp interest in and a decisive concern for the historical and especially the history of science and technology, Starling implicates history's untimely workings in the present.
