Road for the Future Judith Dean
Judith Dean responds to different contexts using a wide range of media, including sculpture, installation, video and performance. She is particularly interested in ideas of territory and claiming.
Road for the Future
December 2024
Judith Dean has been working with ideas of territory and claiming, conflating the epic and the everyday, negotiating the omnipresence of cliché.
Faced with working remotely in relation to the Common, Dean resorted to trying to be there when she wasn’t, which immediately meant the Common didn’t have to be what or where it is, and that other places, where neither of them were or ever could be, could intrude.
The farce begins.
The Common becomes Rome, both as a foundation of British history and as a symbol of colonization, with a little persuasion and sometimes with the aid of props. This, in turn, is invaded by footage and sound from a variety of sources, that can both be related and unrelated to the Common and Rome; that offer simultaneously superficial and substantial relationships to both.
The work, a video, will be returned to Powerstock Common, where it will be shown on the tumulus, its oldest marked historical site. A performance / walk will take material from the video back into the unmediated world, a kind of excavation and / or reenactment of something that hasn’t happened yet, to see what happens next.
30/04/2012
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14/09/2011
I’m in London, sporadically and remotely working on this project for Powerstock Common. I have over 250 photos and piles of notes, and an inaccurate model I made a few weeks ago using an A1 photocopy, green watercolour and clay. I also have various props I bought earlier in the summer with the Common in mind (with the common in mind), some fragments of video footage shot from my computer, and a contact mic. And I’ve been thinking about Rome, with links to the Common, other recent projects and the desire to be somewhere I’m not.