Kieren Reed

Kieren Reed has a multifaceted practice, encompassing research, sculpture, performance and installation. Fundamentally it addresses a personal engagement with the construction process.

Recent artworks take an interest in the relationship between functioning and non-functioning objects – the real and the fabricated.  He is also interested in methods of display adopted from museology and in how the selection of objects for reproduction or display can elevate their status and importance, yet purposely suppressing their functionality.

Kieren has been interested in simulating the traditions of making craft objects and the use of historic techniques, as well as enabling the audience to participate though mechanisms. Referencing folk traditions and rites of passage he built an Irish seafaring boat – a curragh, during a recent residency. Fascinated by the research and correctness of this undertaking, the boat itself had to function successfully as a boat as well as an art object and was launched as part of a public event. The curragh was intended to act to develop a rhetoric and a relationship with the experience of both making and using the boat and the communication this creates with the audience, which itself forms part of the work.

The installation, ‘why can’t you go back home forever and let me be?’ differs from earlier works in that although it appears to be a functioning space, it acts simply as a pastiche or copy of an original 1960’s working recording booth. All the elements are in place, but the workings have been removed and it now only functions purely on a visual level. The booth has a nostalgic presence in a created and controlled environment of a white cube architectural space, surrounded by background research and a collection of related ephemera – including original blank vinyl discs and recordings made in similar booths over the last 50 years, as well as documentation of the Graham Greene novel, Brighton Rock and Jean-Luc Godard's Masculine Feminine - within both of which similar recording booths are featured. The very fact that these objects and recordings themselves are displayed under glass, removes much of their original function too and reduces them to a visual comment and only a possibility of listening, watching or reading.

As much as the recording booth is a non-functional object and therefore is restricting to the audience who expected it to record, Kieren sought to complete the understanding of it as a nostalgic object. Appearing on a BBC Radio programme, he requested original recordings, stories and nostalgic memories about this and similar recording booths and as a result various listeners self-made records were played live on air.

Kieren’s drawings explore his themes further and link his process of making to his thought process of future works. Referencing lamps and modernist design, they are mathematically and technically correct to establish scale and dimensions towards decoding potential sculptures.