Entanglements

Working with stone, construction materials and found objects Cullen orchestrates a series of sculptural assemblages that explore the tensions between the mediating role of language, concept and text and the forces of materiality that enact the ‘image’ and release the power of metaphor that work within and across ‘things in themselves.’

Such metaphors suggest diverse and entangled material and conceptual origins that interfere with accepted readings of the world and challenge any straightforward contextualisation of the work. As Cullen suggests in this extract from the exhibition text, “… In this exhibition I want to present works that resist exact definition, remaining paradoxical and ambiguous, strange and dubious. These works strive towards a transformed, and reinterpreted reality, not to just establish ‘what’ the world is, but to explore ‘how’ the world is.

A constantly changing contextual reality, continuously stimulating new impressions, sentiments, hopes and desires that is conveyed no longer by the text but through the image, raises the question of how ideas, values and concepts can today be mediated rhetorically (in a metaphorical sense) to a creatively involved public. How is it possible today to tell stories cross-culturally and globally with conviction. The intellect today, already overtaxed by variety and fragmented reality, is being presented, in the countless variety of media with actual links that in turn help to form opinions and to establish identities. In this ‘pictorial’ imagistic and metaphoric world, where not only words or signs act as mediators but where ‘things’ themselves from the living world around us, also take on their own meaning, visual metaphors supply pictorial charge of fatally heterogeneous elements. Being placed in an everyday context these metaphors may become factors of interference and can shatter the customary equilibrium effectively as the virtually unadorned fact. Since the metaphor not only pervades the world of poetic invention but is also rooted in the scientific and theoretical language, it can lay claim to a certain fundamental unfettered emancipation.

The metaphor nomadic, and free, inhabits a niche in the no-man’s land between image and concept, it does not feel comfortable in a disciplined calculated world of digested experience. The metaphor appropriates, refutes and convinces by means of suggestion, and reveals, in its use of the context it exposes, the deception of a clearly unattainable unambiguity. It virtually relieves the circumstantial context of its availability as a discursive argument.

The power of the metaphor to touch and move us, lies in its many layered iridescence, the metaphor, “You can’t see the wood for the trees”, has become an absolute metaphor for the world which is as unable to separate into qualities and quantities as the aforementioned wood into trees. The metaphor of the wood becomes poetic suggestion if the aesthetic evidence is based on the fact that everyone has seen without being able to put it into words. In the intersubjective argument that derives from a well chosen image, carrying it further although without being able to substantiate the source of its impact, the metaphor qualifies as aesthetic, and thus provides the ultimate, totally disinhibiting license for applied ambiguity.” (Cullen, D. 2012)