‘Disquiet Relics’
Edvard Blomstrøm and Conor Browne’s Wicker Man Song (@ New Glasgow Society, 7-9th Nov 2024)
What does it mean to conjure a world? To assemble fragments of place, time, and myth into something both familiar and otherworldly? Wicker Man Song gestures toward these questions with an eerie evocation, summoning anxieties of the present, through traces of the past.
Fig.
1. Install shot, Wicker Man Song, New Glasgow Society, 2024. Photography:
Beck Slack.
Installed at New Glasgow Society, this was the collaborative effort of Oslo-born Edvard Blomstrøm, and Conor Browne from Waterford, Ireland – both final year Painting BA students at the Glasgow School of Art. With Blomstrøm drawing influence from medieval history, and Browne from industrial music and futurism, Wicker Man Song forges a dialogue between two temporalities, revealing a haunting familiarity.
Exploring how historical upheavals resonate within modern socio-political struggles – where technology parallels feudal oppression, Blomstrøm and Browne wave toward a tension not yet relinquished. Materialism is at the forefront of how Wicker Man Song creates this dialogue between past and present, as well as the strange sense of angst which hovers somewhere between the two.
Neither a requiem for a past, nor a ‘calling-forth-a-people-to-come’,Wicker Man Song is instead a performance of residual anxieties and incoming futures. This trans-temporal world relies on a folkloric imagination, with Blomstrøm and Browne’s work akin to contemporary relics that narrate an anger toward the seeming inevitability of history repeating itself.
Fig. 2. Edvard Blomstrøm, Pilniewinks, 2024, etched mild steel, 85x34cm. Photography: Beck Slack.
The space, theatrically dimmed, felt barren and uneasy. It seemed as though the work – almost all made from metal and assembled around Browne’s thurible-like instrument H.A.A.R.P.,(fig.1,3) – demanded a gaze, half-awake.
Consisting of a vibrating spring, echo chamber, and automated batons, H.A.A.R.P.emitted a demystified drone which appeared to reverberate throughout the other relics. Everything in this room wanted to be heard; everything constituted a desire for disruption. [Was this the song of the wicker man?] Something else could be said regarding hypnosis, trance, and spells, but I’m more interested in asking: what latent energies remain in objects, sound, and space? Can fragments – displaced, disassembled – retain their power to weave worlds anew?
Fig. 3. Conor Browne, H.A.A.R.P., 2024, spring, mylar, cardboard, dc motors, voltage controllers, wood, metal, plastic dog collar, rope. Dimensions variable. Photography: Beck Slack.
Within Blomstrøm’s work, these worlds arrive as secrets. His process of etching into steel, allows drawings to reveal themselves through the viewer’s movement in relation to light. Indoctrinated with a slowness, the drawings – referencing medieval imagery (see Fig.4.) – occur as an unravelling, a glimpse. However, an illustrative nature detaches them from something of the past; they are their own mythic worlds, hidden, and waiting to be found.
Fig. 4. Edvard Blomstrøm, Spokes I-IV (detail), 2023, etched mild steel, 44x4cm. Photography: Beck Slack.
Watching them move, as you move, they become strange gardens which contain their own secrets and stories. This tension between being alive in movement and still in object-permanence, is what culminates in this unravelling, wherein something residual is both spilling out and calling-forth.
Facing these quiet myths are Browne’s wrought-iron fences, displaced and re-bound by steel (see Fig.4 & 5.). We don’t know what garden or land these posts originate from – they are merely fragments of somewhere else – acts of de-territorialization and resistance. Functioning as non-sites, they channel a past whilst ripping the world anew; within them is an energy of both history and the present – a metallic collision of time and place.
Fig. 5. Conor Browne, Untitled, 2023, Fig. 6. Conor Browne, Untitled, 2023,
steel and iron, 77x10cm. steel and iron, 100x17.
Interrupting the previous emphasis of motion in the space, their immobility serves as corporeal reminders of laborious tension and working-class struggle, perhaps our own, or perhaps not. In a digitised, technofeudalcontext, this tactile corporeality – seeping with autonomy – seems to ask for our solidarity.
Although we may enter channelled, fictive worlds – like those emerging from Blomstrøm’s engravings, Browne’s situated relics are as much a part of our physical experience than imaginative. Together, Wicker Man Song is a room in flux, where forces from both the past and present emphasise an apprehension for a future. Murmuring their disquiet, the artists’ relics are not passive nor obsolete, but gestures of a feeling not yet abandoned. They are beckoning us to sympathise, and to dream toward the possibility of a (temporal) unravelling.
Fig. 7. Install shot, Wicker Man Song, New Glasgow Society, 2024. Photography: Beck Slack.
Edvard Blomstrøm and Conor Browne’s Wicker Man Song New Glasgow Society
1307 Argyle Street G3 8TL 7-9th November 2024
Edvard Blomstrøm @enblomst
Conor Browne @homer.loves.marge
List of figures
Fig. 1. Install shot, Wicker Man Song, 2024.
Fig. 2. Edvard Blomstrøm, Pilniewinks, 2024, etched mild steel, 85x34cm.
Fig. 3. Conor Browne, H.A.A.R.P.(high-frequency active auroral research programme), 2024, spring, mylar, cardboard, dc motors, voltage controllers, wood, metal, plastic dog collar, rope. Dimensions variable.
Fig. 4. Edvard Blomstrøm, Spokes I-IV, 2023, etched mild steel, 44x4cm.
Fig. 5. Conor Browne, Untitled, 2023, steel and iron, 77x10cm.
Fig. 6. Conor Browne, Untitled, 2023, steel, and iron, 100x17.
Fig. 7. Install shot, Wicker Man Song, 2024.