Grid System, 2024
Installation
Aluminium, LED lights, speakers, computer
In Grid System Ben Cullen Williams places the viewer in a series of grids, existing and imposed, seem-ingly simple yet complex. The grid, having emerged over 2000 years ago, now at the heart of modern society’s daily lives, measuring, quantifying, controlling, and liberating. With land, space, and time physically and immaterially ordered through human intervention. Changing humankind’s understanding and experience of the world. The work, located within the vaults of the demolished 19th century Clerkenwell House of Detention is in direct conversation with its environment, a historical place of trapping. Two rotating scanning lights shine through a mesh, casting shadows on the surrounding walls. The beams of light shatter and fragment, destroying and creating, mapping and altering. The technical structure takes cues from scanners, lighthouses and searchlights, all of which can be seen to be inherently paradoxical, while being deeply enmeshed into contemporary landscapes, from the psychological to the physical, existing as modes of seeing the unseeable. The grid also exists in this space of the tangible and the intangible, from the built environment to mappings on the natural world, aiming to quantify the unquantifiable. Through Williams’ collaboration with musician Harrison Cargill sound forms part of the work. Recordings of landscapes from across Britain have been manipulated and ordered into sonic grids, creating new modes of audio presentation of the familiar.
