A compendium of recent research and work from the artist Jacob Clayton merging studio notes, diary entries, annotated readings, and physical works in various stages of completion. Guardian Angels deals in information that lingers, that somehow haunts and offers salvation. Here there is a ceaseless crashing into the future, an inescapable past, and a fear amidst the widening craters of individual experience, politics, and truth.
“Within critical art practice, the most important factor defining art from politics is that there is no real difference between what is thought and what is executed. Art is not burdened with the political responsibility of designing and implementing complete idealised systems, instead defining a space of intuition and imagination. However, as we navigate our existences full of forking roads, dead ends, and labyrinths, the paths we travel brush us with the vegetation and ephemera of our place in time - and sticking to us like catchweed, or lodging like gum in the tread of our shoes, they provoke us into trying to make sense of the world around us. What then is an artist to do but to bring these things back with them; to find a place for them among all the other artefacts from all the other journeys? If the history of art and creativity has taught us one discernable thing, it is that we collectively require a place where things can float - a limbo, or a data bank of thoughts... like a scratch disk on a hard drive. Here among the stored and accumulated - not quite harvested, but not exactly intruding - materials, the political action finds us, and it has never been more than a lost pair of eyes, darting around an open playground, reaching for something familiar."
