Brian Catling: Cyclops

The South London Gallery provides the setting for a unique and intriguing multimedia event, the creation of the Cyclops. This monumental video project draws it essence from the city around it, to construct a strange and powerful installation. As each day drains into night, the image of the Cyclops is thrown into vivid prominence and his accompanying monologue builds into a brutal roar within the created environment. Visitors experience the implied personality of an unknown creature, the Cyclops, made manifest through artistic process.

Cyclops is the fifth step in the creation of Brian Catling’s mythological being, weaving a poetic relationship between words and images, touching installation, sculpture, literature and theatre. The exhibition melds contemporary technology with poetic vision, one of a series of exhibitions at the South London Gallery examining the possibilities opening up to artists using new media. The visual and emotional impact of Cyclops will create itself in the space of the South London Gallery in the mind’s eye and space of the viewer, art unrestrained by the wall.

Brian Catling brings a unique personal vision to events that are more than performance, visual exhibition or installation. Recent work includes Scroll (1994), staged in the King’s Library at the British Museum, a project linking the written word and the imaginative experience outwards into the space of the Library and the mind of the viewers, and The Blinding (Serpentine Gallery). Earlier stages of Cyclops have previously been seen in Germany, London and Paris. Brian Catling is head of sculpture at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford and fellow of Linacre College, Oxford.

Brian Catling
Cyclops