Currently on show in The Art Station lobby space, 9am-5pm / Mon-Fri until Friday 1st April
Unseen & Unceasing is part of a creative heritage project that began last year when The Art Station opened areas of the old Saxmundham telephone exchange to the public for the first time. Partnering with BT Adastral Park and Saxmundham Museum, The Art Station ran a series of heritage Open Days that celebrated the building’s historical significance as a hub for connectivity in Suffolk from the 1950s-1980s.
Taking inspiration from this project, Henry Driver has created a new digital artwork that visualises the vast, hidden connectivity of technology. The work takes the form of video, projected on a large scale or viewed online or within a 360 degrees virtual environment. For this exhibition Henry also presents plywood 2D and 3D sculptures.
Unseen & Unceasing explores different networks of connectivity and communication – from the manual connections once patched through lines in a telephone exchange, to the instantaneous mobile and fibre optic networks that have spread across the world.
However, these are not the only vast communication networks to exist – below each forest and wood there is an underground web of roots, fungi and bacteria that connects trees and plants to one another. This subterranean social network known as the ‘wood wide web’, allows trees to talk, trade, and compete with one another – but what impact are humans having on these ancient ecological networks and how will they respond to rising temperatures?
Unseen & Unceasing is an awe inspiring digital immersive experience, inviting the viewer to explore incredibly vivid and complex visual environments and discover more about the nature of connectivity.
On Friday 4th March 2022 The Art Station presented Unseen & Unceasing during a special launch event. This included a large scale projection of the work, a smaller projected work onto a 3D form and several other 3D works installed in the lobby alongside screened excerpts of the work.
From March 4th to April 1st Unseen & Unceasing will continue to be exhibited in our lobby exhibition space. Open from Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm at The Art Station.
Henry Driver is a young artist based in Suffolk who works with digital media to connect us to the environment and present responses to climate change. He has shown work across the world in Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, India, Japan, Portugal, South Korea, Turkey and Taiwan. While in the UK, Driver has shown at Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Barbican.
Find out more about Henry’s work here: https://www.henrydriverartist.com/
Unseen & Unceasing forms part of the Exchange heritage project, that opened up parts of the former Saxmundham Telephone Exchange to the public in September 2021.
Follow the link below to explore this project – including photos and interviews from former employees of the exchange.
This project has been made possible by funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Suffolk County Council Covid Continuity Fund for Culture.
