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| Stephen Flanagan. No Fork, 2018. Assemblage of found industrial blue prints on Botany Road. |
Stephen Flanagan is not an artist.He is a little cagey about what he is but he is clear on the fact that his working life started at 16 as an apprentice Instrument Artificer. That translates as, a mechanical craftsman who worked on instruments. They might have been, hydraulic or pneumatic or electrical, but they were all calibrated. They were tuned and they were maintained with the attention that a craftsman brings to art. For Stephen it is a bygone era of delight. Now digital instruments self-calibrate at the press of a button; or, don’t, in which case they are replaced in an economically rational manner.
In his own words, Stephen is “a discerning collector of useless materials” who came across a case of antique blue prints while exploring one of the redundant industrial sites along Botany Road. It doesn’t matter whether or not these drawings are art, their lines do a mindful dance in blue. The blue print process gives them a legibility that rests in the blur of something that doesn’t quite become a photograph. They are mechanical, 100% in form and content.
“The theme is the demise of the manufacturing industry and the dominance of residential development” is how Stephen described his work. And sure enough the mechanical era is being brushed aside to make way for technology, in the relentless march towards a just utopia, a revised abundance of material benefit that is and has been Botany Road.
Along this march, Stephen, the connoisseur, found pause for thought in a bundle of drawings, meticulously crafted, judiciously archived that he has given the mantle of art. A transitory state where words like speculative and conditional remind us that art is not an answer - it’s a question. A sort of half way house between the stuff of reality and the stuff of museums where things can make it clear that it’s not only artists who make art.
-Tony Twigg
