Twelve Around One is pleased to present ‘Residue of an Image’, an exhibition of new work by Josephine Rowntree. Rowntree's interdisciplinary practice is represented here by a moving-image work, a selection of lights, wall-mounted perspex cut-outs and a site-specific intervention in the space outside the gallery.

‘Residue of an Image’ is both the title of the show and the concept behind each of the works. It refers to the residue or remainder of an attempt to share or articulate an idea, and looks for aesthetic potential in the gaps between solitary thought and social interaction.

Through the construction of works across various media, the artist shows that the material results of a process of communication are often made far more interesting by the removal of the specific thought or idea that engendered them. Thus her works bear witness to a movement from the particular to the general, providing a space within which the audience can project their own thoughts, ideas and memories.

The artist is interested in the process of attempting to form and communicate mental imagery. Although her initial working process involves her immersion in the world of the imagination, the process of executing the works is heavily influenced by the materialist traditions of modernism. Thus the total effect of her work is an attempt to reconcile the real and the imaginary by creating specific objects that are combined together to create environments that sit outside the realm of everyday consumerism. 

The critical edge of her practice is not defined by a reaction against the material, economic reality of the artwork. It has more to do with the desire to work and create objects that allow for a form of experience that is speculative, transient and able to evade hierarchies and ideologies. To think in cinematic terms, it is as if the machines of the Hollywood 'Dream Factory' had been taken over by a European artist with minimalist tendencies. 

Asked to describe her feelings about the show, the artist responded with a quote taken from Jean-Luc Godard: “I am thinking of something..When I think of something, well actually, I am always thinking of something else...”

Josephine Rowntree, born 1985 in Paris, lives and works in London.