‘Dependent Arising’ was commissioned in March 2022. Its title derives from the Buddhist concept of interdependence. The exhibition forms part of No War For Heavy Metal, a wider body of work developed by Raydale Dower in response to the presence of nuclear weapons in Scotland at the RNAD Coulport base on Loch Long in Argyll.
In Bomb Culture (1968), Jeff Nuttall wrote, ‘To a certain degree the Underground happened everywhere spontaneously. It was simply what you did in the H-bomb world if you were, by nature, creative and concerned for humanity as a whole.’
Dower’s work began while undertaking a visual arts residency at Cove Park, located close to the nuclear weapon storage facility, in the summer of 2019. Following a presentation of his research there, Dower has continued to develop this body of work, most recently while working on a Cryptic and British Council funded UK Russia Creative Bridge Residency in Ekaterinburg, Russia, between January and February 2022.
‘Dependent Arising’ engages with these histories and subjects. The typographic prints establish continuity within the series itself. ‘No War’ is a universal protest. ‘Heavy Metal’ references, simultaneously, the music genre, military hardware and the periodic table of the elements. William S. Burroughs is often credited with coining the term through the character Uranian Willy The Heavy Metal Kid in his Nova trilogy.
The ‘equilibrium’ balloon included in the exhibition, a 5.5 ft Cloudbuster, can be used as a weather balloon to carry instruments into the atmosphere to check conditions, determining wind currents or the altitude of cloud layers. The data collected has military and civilian uses; balloons are also launched by amateur enthusiasts. Here, its sensitivity interrupts the space, offering both a benevolent, peaceable void and an anarchic disruptive presence. A clear leader film loop conjures a constant light and movement, hovering between states.
The exhibition is accompanied by a new image–text work, Light and light (colours in your mind), which intersperses stills from an experimental 16mm film, developed during the artist’s residency at Cove Park, with writing by Calum Sutherland. The section headings of this book – the first in a series of artists’ books published by Cento – are borrowed from the last page of ‘Sun Push’ by Graham M. Hall, a short story originally published in the British science fiction magazine New Worlds in January 1967:
aaaaAAAH! The ColOURS!
Light! Apple plum sallow flame; iridescent khaki,
citron gleaming light, DAZZLE! Flaring sable; steel-
scintillate, emerald extinguish; saffron beam SEAR!
LIGHT! Lurid verdigris tan; bright crimson rubies,
bronzed, flashing YELLOW! Ebony snow, brindled sepia
leaves of olive, jet white blaze! Glittering pearly blood;
brown amethysts; incandescent rust grass GLARE!
Scarlet-barred lemons, lilac raves, soot-misted burning
zebras of lights, coruscating and coryban dancing in and,
oh God, rice-swirling walls and down
Down
Down swim sun
Down into pools of sun
down swim into sunlight
Down, down swim into pools of sunlight
* * *
Mud grey and sun bright merging,
They came, and they led him away.
Blind.
