Visual arts artist
Darren Farquhar
| Darren Farquhar has recently been awarded a professional development fund 2008/09 from the Scottish Arts Council, and is set to undertake a micro-residency at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop this Autumn 08. |
Petra Pennington introduces the work of Darren Farquhar
Darren Farquhar is a performance artist based in Edinburgh. His work focuses on setting a scene to which the viewers are witnesses to an abstract act, the contemporary art-going audience rigidly set against displaying any reaction; non-emotionally embroiled as if spectators on the dissection of cadavers in a Victorian anatomy theatre.
Distinctly awkward and relishing in the absurd, Farquhar's performance works draw from his influences in cult cinema and drum-based sub-pop music.
|
  |
In his most recent work, a short untitled performance 'sketch' as part of the Artoscopic evening of happenings in an old railway tunnel under Arthur's Seat (Edinburgh's landmark craggy lump of royal parkland), Darren, dressed in red drapery with a shiny stainless steel colander strapped to his face, beats out a grinding rhythm on a drum kit against the tunnel wall... |
.. the scene tightly surrounded by a trail of three identically-costumed performers shuffling in formation to complete an awkward composition of movement and sound, which ends as suddenly as it began, the audience remaining uncertainly standing until the artist tells them 'that's it.'
Farquhar has the roots of his practice in sculpture; this shows through in the props, costumes and three-dimensional characters he furnishes his sets with, and the re-use and development of components across separate works, extending a greater narrative.
In 'The Beautician' (2006), a forlorn maiden of misery sewn of canvas with mussel-shell pubic hair is worn down the spine of the artist in a slow jerking solo dance before being attacked and subordinated by a frenetic paper-clad crusader.
|
The same female sculpture went on to make appearances in two later performances, being sawn in two in 'Dahmer's Form of Expression 1' at the end of the Shangri-la-la exhibition in Edinburgh's festival summer 2007; the bisected torso becoming the distaff focal point in 'RRRootless Pith', Farquhar's offering in the Garden Galleries series of Portobello domestic micro-residencies as part of Big Things on the Beach 2008. |
 |
This recent work more than others emphasised an almost operatic juxtaposition of masculine and feminine elements fulfilling respectively aggressive and mourning roles within a green garden setting swathed in red cloth.
|
The performance terminated with the comic failed entry of a copper phallus mounted onto remote-controlled car, trying to burst, Gladiators-style from within it's paper membrane garage. |
 |
This combination of negative emotions: frustration, rage, anger and violence, often with an undercurrent of awkward humour, characterises Farquhar's work. The fact that all of his characters are in some way inhibited in their faculties (made blind, deaf, mute, or physically constrained) means that the players have to work against themselves to carry out the action Farquhar has charged them with.
|
 |
In 'The Butcher' (part of the Bodyparts 2007 festival of performance art in the Royal Scottish Academy) the protagonist is an embodiment of this endurance-based principal.
Stripped to the waist, he's the navvy and the woodsman, the work and the 'do, not think'. He wears a constrictive mask, designed to blinker him, render him deaf and only able to breath through the mouth. |
He is forced to see red through the mask's coloured lenses; the anonymous aggression channelled into the destruction of meat and wood. His mask and primitive trousers are made of white canvas, to record the transactions of this aggressive action in colour and pattern while the audience are restricted to seeing a blurred vision through the polythene zoo cage, or else catch a more risky closer look through one of its cut peepholes.
Other works have included a more overtly theatrical foray into the strange.
|
 |
'The Sump' (2006) depended on an elaborate set, flooding the performance area with a pool of milk with spiked onion 'mines', the Sump (a character named after the parts of domestic and industrial machinery which accumulate the gunk of their usage), paddling through in a pantomime boat on casters while the strobing effect of many instamatic cameras flashing revealed other, hidden glittering characters menacingly forming the backdrop. |
Farquhar continues to add to his performance portfolio, relentlessly cooking up more scenes of wonder and uncertainty; its compilation gradually amassing like an embarrassing collection of weird uncles.
Petra Pennington 2008
|
Darren Farquhar was born in Huntly Aberdeenshire in 1977
BA (hons) Edinburgh College of Art 2001-2005
MFA Sculpture Edinburgh College of Art 2005-2007
Darren continues to live and work in Edinburgh.
| |