Bewildering Scheme Joseph Worley

Joe Worley’s Bewildering Scheme covers the walls, floor and ceiling of an entire gallery space with hard edged and angled blocks of colour. This achromatic patterning is an exercise in spacial distortion: twisting, disrupting and expanding space and perspective to create a virtual space within the architecture.

Worley’s design is inspired by a pattern developed by British Naval Lieutenant Norman Wilkinson during WW1. Painted on to battleships merchant vessels and aircraft, Wilkinson’s Dazzle pattern was intended to make it difficult to judge a vessel's speed and direction. This was a camouflage system designed not to conceal, but to confuse. The Dazzle pattern mimics not only the aesthetic of the British pre-war Vorticist movement but also its faith in modernity, and its proscribed role for art in the service of ‘progress’. Whilst the effectiveness of the pattern to reduce losses to shipping remained unproven, it did provide a thin veneer of courage for soldiers facing the machinery of war.

Click to download the exhibition text (PDF)

Presented alongside Roger Boyce and Marie Claire Brehaut Nature Morte and Melissa Laing a small metal pin, a piece of rubber, a section of metal pipe with securing nut, exhibitions which spiral around our morbid fascination with death, depravity, disorientation, disaster, doubt, danger and destruction.