About

For Want of (not) Measuring brings together artists Ron Haselden, Jim Hobbs, Patrick Adam Jones and John Timberlake who explore the problematic and poetic use of systems and measurement. Whereas measurement often focuses on quantitative results, the artists instead choose a metaphysical approach to exploit the corporeal use of measuring apparatus as a vehicle for critique. Here, surveying sticks, cameras, physical grids, and light meters (amongst many other tools) are all used to point out the futility, absurdity and impossibility of truly knowing the world around us; seascapes and passages are investigated though their human relationships to the measurement of time, perspective, location and memory.

Ron Haselden
Ron was born just downstream from Greenwich and visits to the Maritime Museum were quite frequent when young. Meridian zero establishes a place as either a beginning or ending and travel always comes to mind – travel and distance – in either direction.

Jim Hobbs
For the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Jim Hobbs has built a large scale sculpture/structure which houses the filmic installation H(xy)/V(z) = Ø. The work stems from an interest in the nocturnal and the use of artificial lighting to create or enhance an augmented form of vision. The recollected experience of being blinded by lights while driving at night is the catalyst for a series of loosely linked moving images and graphics which in turn create a type of hallucinatory experience.

Patrick Adam Jones
The current work is a continuation of an ongoing series based on The Schiehallion Experiment of 1774 which attempted to calculate the density of the Earth. Here, there is an interest in how we continue to use measurements in an absurd manner as a way of packaging our relationship to the world around us, making safe, explaining away, avoiding, etc.

John Timberlake
John Timberlake’s pair of large sea paintings, Beyond the Wall Lies the Ocean, executed in oils on linen, are painted from viewpoints of actual immersion, as if the viewer is struggling to keep their head above the waves. Whilst referencing genre painting and the fabled fathomlessness of the ocean, Timberlake’s paintings also resonate with the historical specifics of Greenwich’s history at the centre of empire, the oceanic of psychoanalysis, and of course, climate change and rising sea levels.

* The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with a text by Stephen Kennedy; Design by Elena Tzilini; Installation Team: Max Holdaway and Lauryn Keift-Wilshere; Sound Editing and Mixing (Hobbs): Jono Crabbe; Sound Installation (Hobbs) FTV support.