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Sax Impey 'Pacific'

Catalogue for the exhibition 'Pacific' by Sax Impey at Anima Mundi

Catalogue for the exhibition 'Pacific' by Sax Impey at Anima Mundi

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S A X I M P E Y PACIFIC


“Considering the small size of these islands, we feel the more astonished at the<br />

number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height<br />

crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava streams still distinct, we<br />

are led to believe that within a period, geologically recent, the unbroken ocean was here<br />

spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that<br />

great fact - that mystery of mysteries - the first appearance of new beings on this earth…”<br />

Charles Darwin, Journal


“To sail... to pursue the setting sun, to bend a sheet<br />

to sail and harness the wind… to enter the pelagic<br />

realm, to cast off the inconsequential and the false…<br />

to encounter everything on its’ own terms, unmediated…<br />

to greet the welcome arrival of a lone sea bird with all<br />

and total concentration…”<br />

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Preface<br />

Anima Mundi is delighted to present<br />

‘Pacific’ by the internationally renowned<br />

British artist <strong>Sax</strong> <strong>Impey</strong>.<br />

‘Pacific’ is an exhibition of new work,<br />

comprising multi-scale painting, drawing<br />

and a film work, made by the artist<br />

following completion of a 5,000 mile<br />

sailing trip in the Pacific Ocean in 2018,<br />

from Panama to Chile via the Galapagos<br />

Islands and Rapa Nui (Easter Island).<br />

The work draws upon the unique<br />

experiences of the 60 day voyage, including<br />

both extraordinary landfalls and the time<br />

spent sailing one of the most remote<br />

parts of the ocean. The exhibition offers a<br />

compelling record, which both witnesses<br />

the duration of a long ocean voyage, with<br />

its storms and calms, and finds in the<br />

fantastic archaeology of Rapa Nui a potent<br />

echoing symbolism for our own time<br />

and culture.<br />

The film work, ‘Pacific’, compresses the<br />

chronological passage of two months into<br />

one hour, enabling in the viewer a sense of<br />

the duration of the whole, and of certain<br />

key passages of time, elements and sea<br />

state - a work which, whilst meditative and<br />

ruminative, contains a strong sense of the<br />

very real jeopardy such a voyage entails.<br />

The film, and select drawings in the<br />

exhibition, also focus on the mariners<br />

developing relationship with the birds<br />

of the sea, the welcome encounters with<br />

these wanderers of the open ocean, and<br />

with those that presage the coming land,<br />

and find in the frigate bird a particular,<br />

totemic, otherworldly presence, its<br />

evocative form so placed between man and<br />

bird as to suggest something else entirely.<br />

Many of the exhibition works depict<br />

some of the nearly 1,000 monumental<br />

statues, or ‘Moai’, found on the island<br />

of Rapa Nui (now called Isla de Pascua,<br />

and still known widely as Easter Island),<br />

one of the most remote inhabited<br />

islands in the world. These extraordinary<br />

creations stand silently, enigmatically<br />

presiding over a history of deforestation,<br />

overuse of resources, extinctions and<br />

internecine warfare, and, with the arrival<br />

of Europeans, slavery and disease. With<br />

our own culture engaged in the same<br />

destructive process on a far larger scale,<br />

the artist presents us with images which,<br />

whilst both mysterious and evocative,<br />

contain an urgent and salutary message.<br />

The sightless, penetrating, gaze of each<br />

one of the line of towering figures at<br />

Tongariki still contain an accusatory,<br />

baleful or beseeching warning to us all.<br />

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“This creature… the frigate bird. I see them, wheeling, turning, swooping, and<br />

something so insistent calls from my own subconscious… I don’t know what it is…<br />

There is an otherness to these creatures, with their form redolent of both bird and<br />

man, a suggestion of something else entirely… something that crossed into our world<br />

from another… perhaps they wheel about the river Styx, and line the rail as Charon<br />

plies his crossing… He occupies my dreams now, this birdman, and brings foreboding…<br />

There is fear onboard… trepidation for the voyage ahead… I think this birdman<br />

comes with us, and haunts our wake, the brief trace of which marks our own passing<br />

as surely and as inexorably as the passage of our vessel through the open ocean.”<br />

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Frigate Bird Studies<br />

charcoal on paper, 100 x 70 cm<br />

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Frigate Bird Studies<br />

charcoal on paper, 100 x 70 cm<br />

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Frigate Bird Study<br />

charcoal on paper, 50 x 70 cm<br />

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The Frigate<br />

charcoal on paper, 152 x 244 cm<br />

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Albatross Studies<br />

pencil on paper, 70 x 100 cm<br />

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F8 S Pacific Study<br />

pencil on paper, 30 x 43 cm<br />

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F8 S Pacific Study<br />

pencil on paper, 30 x 43 cm<br />

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F8 S Pacific Study<br />

pencil on paper, 30 x 43 cm<br />

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F8 S Pacific Study<br />

pencil on paper, 30 x 43 cm<br />

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F8 S Pacific, Following Sea<br />

charcoal on paper, 110 x 142 cm<br />

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F9, S Pacific<br />

charcoal on paper, 70 x 100 cm<br />

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F9 S Pacific Study<br />

charcoal on paper, 30 x 47 cm<br />

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F9 S Pacific Study<br />

charcoal on paper, 30 x 47 cm<br />

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F9 S Pacific Study<br />

charcoal on paper, 30 x 47 cm<br />

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F9 S Pacific Study<br />

charcoal on paper, 30 x 47 cm<br />

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F9, 39 Degrees S, 400 Miles from Chile<br />

mixed media on panel, 72 x 107 cm<br />

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F9<br />

mixed media on panel, 30 x 60 cm<br />

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F9<br />

mixed media on panel, 30 x 60 cm<br />

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“Rapa Nui is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the<br />

world. The tiny population on Pitcairn is 1300 miles away, and<br />

continental Chile some 2200 miles to the east. To sail away from there is<br />

to enter a vast empty ocean, where your vessel is alone. As the Southern<br />

latitude rises, so does the weather… low pressure system following high<br />

following low in never ending succession… each system taking just a few<br />

days to cross the South Pacific from New Zealand to South America.”<br />

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Rano Raraku<br />

charcoal on paper, 100 x 70 cm<br />

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Rano Raraku<br />

charcoal on paper, 100 x 70 cm<br />

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Rano Raraku<br />

charcoal on paper, 100 x 70 cm<br />

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Rano Raraku<br />

charcoal on paper, 100 x 70 cm<br />

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Rano Raraku<br />

charcoal on paper, 70 x 100 cm<br />

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Rano Raraku<br />

charcoal on paper, 70 x 100 cm<br />

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Tongariki<br />

charcoal on paper, 152 x 213 cm<br />

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“All civilisations end, one way or another... only the myopic and<br />

the stupid can gaze complacently out from their own and expect an<br />

entirely different outcome. Rome was eternal, the sun would never set<br />

on the British Empire, and no doubt the Rapa Nui people expected<br />

the towering figures of their ancestors to gaze over a thriving<br />

island for a great deal longer than they did. But deforestation, over<br />

hunting, the overuse of resources, the destruction of their own<br />

environment led to internecine warfare, and the statues were toppled.<br />

The ancestors had failed, and betrayed, and birdman had arrived.<br />

We too will fail, if we persist in blindness - if we keep taking the<br />

blue pill. The corporate construct, with its’ ceaseless torrent, its’<br />

trillions of seconds of advertising lies, day after day, night after<br />

night, year after year after year, layer upon layer; this accretion<br />

of falsehoods overlays the world as it actually is, and replaces it,<br />

creating the conditions for a normalcy which is anything but, where<br />

just about everything considered normal is in fact insane, inhuman,<br />

inhumane and ecologically catastrophic. How is one supposed to live<br />

in this world, to be, to act, when one knows it to be false - to be so<br />

out of step with your own civilisation’s apparent aims and desires<br />

that you have never once felt any sense of belonging and shared<br />

purpose? How many of us feel this way? “Everybody knows the boat is<br />

leaking, everybody knows the captain lied” sang Leonard Cohen.<br />

Well it is, and they did. The line of towering figures at Tongariki<br />

whisper of what they witnessed, and continue to stare from sightless<br />

eye sockets over a world that has gone, with a gaze that contains a<br />

prophetic warning for us all.”<br />

<strong>Sax</strong> <strong>Impey</strong>, 2019<br />

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Rano Raraku<br />

mixed media on panel, 150 x 150 cm<br />

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Rano Raraku<br />

mixed media on panel, 100 x 100 cm<br />

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Rano Raraku<br />

mixed media on panel, 122 x 122 cm<br />

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Anakena<br />

mixed media on panel, 61 x 122 cm<br />

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What Have You Done… (Anakena)<br />

mixed media on panel, 122 x 183 cm<br />

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What have You Done… (Tongariki)<br />

mixed media on panel, 150 x 280 cm<br />

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Biography<br />

<strong>Sax</strong> <strong>Impey</strong> was born in Penzance, Cornwall in 1969. He completed a BA(Hons)<br />

Fine Art at Newport in 1991 and returned to Cornwall in 1994.<br />

Since 2005 he has produced allegorical works derived almost exclusively from<br />

experiences at sea. A qualified RYA Yachtmaster, he has sailed many thousands<br />

of nautical miles in many parts of the world.<br />

<strong>Impey</strong>’s extensive trips at sea have had a profound impact on his life and<br />

subsequent development as an artist. Reconnecting to nature through this<br />

powerful element has the almost inescapable effect of calling to question<br />

some of life’s existential questions. This epiphanic moment of realisation, of<br />

revelation, is at the core of <strong>Impey</strong>’s oeuvre.<br />

Reflecting on and capturing personal moments and making them universal,<br />

<strong>Impey</strong>’s work reaffirms the importance of introspection and confrontation,<br />

found specifically when surrounded by the natural world; “A mind can breathe,<br />

and observe, and reflect, away from the shrill desperation of a culture that,<br />

having forgotten that it is better to say nothing than something about nothing,<br />

invents ever new ways to fill every single space with less and less.”<br />

<strong>Sax</strong> <strong>Impey</strong> has occupied no.8 Porthmeor Studios since 2003, part of an historic<br />

studio complex overlooking Porthmeor beach in St Ives.<br />

In 2007 his work was selected for the ‘Art Now Cornwall’ exhibition at the Tate<br />

St Ives where he was placed on the cover of the associated publication, the same<br />

year he was heralded in The Times as one of the ‘New Faces of Cornish Art’.<br />

In 2010 <strong>Impey</strong> featured in the Owen Sheers, BBC4 Documentary ‘Art of the Sea<br />

(In Pictures)’ alongside Anish Kapoor, J M W Turner, Martin Parr and Maggie<br />

Hambling among others. In 2012 he was elected an Academician of The RWA.<br />

Whilst maintaining a solo studio practice <strong>Impey</strong> has also engaged in<br />

numerous collaborative projects, including film, theatre, performance and<br />

installation works. His paintings are in numerous collections including The<br />

Arts Council, Warwick University, The Connaught Hotel and other private<br />

collections worldwide.<br />

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Published by Anima Mundi to coincide with <strong>Sax</strong> <strong>Impey</strong> ‘Pacific’<br />

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or<br />

by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers<br />

Portrait and still photography by Jamie Mills<br />

“With thanks to Joao Guerra and Ian Thompson, fellow sailors on Astro.” <strong>Sax</strong> <strong>Impey</strong>, 2019<br />

Anima Mundi . Street-an-Pol . St. Ives . Cornwall . +44 (0)1736 793121 . mail@animamundigallery.com . www.animamundigallery.com


www.animamundigallery.com

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