Mark Houghton is interested in everything. Not literally, but in a material and historic sense. Through his sculptures and installations he picks up the 'stuff' around us, the normal, the insignificant, the overlooked, and hands it back to us in some form that feels familiar and intriguing but, somehow, different. There is a relaxed formality to the work, immediately revealing a human intervention, but causing us to question whether this is simply the current point at which this transformation has arrived or if this is now a new permanent state. Mark refers to the '40,000 years of the activity of homo faber' (man, the maker), giving himself our entire history of tinkering, inventing, manipulating and adding to our environment from which to draw. The titles of the works, such as 'King' (2010), 'You Take the Weather With You' (2010), and 'Working Order' (2010), help position them back in to our world on a different level, becoming vehicles for an allusion to a very human place; a shifting of the hierarchy and control from 'man-made object' to objects that surround us and inform how we manoeuvre, as opposed to the other way round. This shift in our perceptions and relationship is key to the work's new function. They serve to, both, highlight and question the volume of the world around us, in all possible meanings of the word, and leave us back in a place where there is genuine wonder in the seemingly mundane.
S Mark Gubb 2011
One of the perennial criticisms levelled at the white cube gallery is its dissociative relationship with the 'real world'. By minimizing any unnecessary detail, removing distractions and presenting a blank environment, the gallery isolates the artwork from the very source it came from. While this often gives the viewer a purer appreciation of works, it can also have the effect of distorting or diminishing the artwork's original intention. Mark Houghton's practice subtly reintroduces the real world to this rarefied environment via the back door, declaring that 'Nothing can exist in isolation'.
The back door Houghton uses to effect this reintroduction is the vast messiness of unsorted memories and associations carried around in the viewer's head. As the practitioner, Houghton's part of the deal is to create a resonant object or configuration of objects; as the viewer we are asked to bring to his work our own personal encyclopaedic records that might give it meaning or significance. Of course, this relationship forms the basis of reading of any and all artworks that offer an interpretation of the world; but the unnerving experience of meeting Houghton's work seems somehow closer to reading an instruction manual in a foreign language, but with lovely diagrams.
Houghton's practice is a prime example of that which confounds any attempt at a conscious, logical reading. It requires a lateral shift in thinking to be appreciated, which is often kick-started by a 'key' element in the work. The series 'Where are we now' (2008-ongoing) shows fragments of domestic interiors, just enough to get a sense of the room we are only partly being shown. A large part of the image has been cut away along a rather theatrical or comical zigzag edge. The remaining periphery now becomes significant, and is supported by a suitably theatrical coloured wooden framework structure. Even though we are presented with just a fragment, it is apparent that the images are the sort of bland showroom interiors found in shopping catalogues or Sunday supplements. It is up to us how we complete this fragment: do we fill in the gaps? Do we make associations with rooms we once occupied ourselves? One thing is clear: Houghton has not provided a whole in composite parts. Finally, the merest shadow or disturbed bedlinen betrays the presence of a figure just outside the cut edge, and we find ourselves one step closer to Houghton's understanding of our world.
'Junkyard Brancussi' (2008) also uses the language of bland or tacky interiors, this time appropriating a sculptural element: the shelf. The object is familiar but its journey to its current state is not quite identifiable - is it a spice rack reworked into a spire motif? Or more simply an up-ended bookshelf? The decorative scalloped edging and dark varnish is reminiscent of overly ornamented sitting rooms in guest houses or pensioners' homes - but all of these readings make no sense of the abstract trapezoidal base made of sheet brass. The closest association is that of the kitsch chimney breasts of the 1970s, but while these were covered with panel-beaten dents, Houghton's base has a flat reflective surface - perhaps in an attempt not to draw attention to itself (like a plinth), but failing. As with much of Houghton's work the piece's refusal to offer any definitive reading is like a half-welcomed liberation for both the work and viewer, an encounter from which we may come away from feeling none the wiser, while actually being anything but.
Chris Brown, March 2009
Co-Director and Founder, G39, Cardiff
Co-Editor, a-n Magazine
I have the pleasure of introducing the work of artist Mark Houghton, a man with an eye for finding significance in the seemingly mundane. He readily admits to spending too much time looking at the floor.
Houghton makes, finds, places and creates stuff we can look at, ignore, work out, draw connections from - but to read his work as simply allegorical arrangements of objects would be naive. His site-specific work offers us an approach to ourselves; there's something incredibly human about his instinctual placement of work in a room, his objects (often placed in an hierarchal manner) connote transference, as well as a very strong pinch of architectural significance.
There's a relationship that he builds between viewer and space, offering a slice, a section of urban speech that, combined, becomes a sort of fluid poetry. Houghton invites us to take not each word, each stanza or couplet but inhabit, readily drink and see how it tastes.
These objects exist only as manners of meanings in our minds - what, then, of belief? Of faith? Of love?
Houghton's work ask us to question, to be nosy, to wonder why, to pry. What I admire about his projects mostly is his aim not to beguile you into feelings of single significance - it works as art because it's intended as such - as arty art. We're invited to draw from it by wrapping our experiences around its folds, corners, overlays of constructed interpretation. It's all our own.
I've always concluded a single question from Houghton's work: what of form and what of meaning? Two indistinguishable, twin lies crafted and only hinted by the artist's hand, yet created by our own experience of existence, our own narrative.
Which is the more false of the two; the objects he has manipulated into our perception, or our manipulated perceptions of the object? But then, I get a cup of tea, a few biscuits, and pop the telly on...
Dawn Shuck 2011
Writer and Curator