The poet scans the landscape with his hermeneutic gaze, but it remains trackless, refuses to emerge into meaningfulness as a landscape of signs".
J.M.Coetzee - "Disgrace" - 1999
Memory of Lemon (2010), site-specific response for the DIY exhibition for the Surface Arts, Exeter. Made entirely from materials and objects found on site.
Mark Houghton's aim is to search for portent and potential narrative in the overlooked and seemingly insignificant aspects of the everyday. We are all surrounded by the evidence and detritus of almost 40,000 years of the activity of homo faber, and any landscape can essentially be read as an inescapable narrative of intervention. Therefore, Houghton feels it important to celebrate and highlight the overlooked elements, the anti-monuments and non-events of that landscape, as he feels that these are equally relevant, when we are attempting to decipher a given landscape. Discarded items; the un-thought about gaps between buildings etc., these all have visual qualities that feed into, and inform our piecemeal absorption of our surroundings, that subsequently help us to order and decipher the complexity of the environments we inhabit.
Houghton feels that the role of the contemporary artist is to force a reassessment of the everyday. It is his intention to highlight overlooked aspects of the everyday, in order to isolate and represent aspects of the urban environment, with the aim of forging a visual poetry of the commonplace, to elevate the irrelevance of the ordinary.