PRESS RELEASE

As seen in Exeter’s Arts and Culture Magazine October Issue

RECONSTRUCTING DUCCIO

Third time is most certainly a charm on Reconstructing Duccio’s final installation within Exeter’s grandeur Cathedral. In succession of the June group MA show, Now’s The Time, Curator Imogen Haisman and Artist Lesley Kerman continue to evolve their partnership with the finissage of their yearlong project.

With the close of the penultimate installation of Reconstructing Duccio and its upcoming finale within Exeter’s cavernous Cathedral, we can begin to explore the journey of this endeavour and what it has grown to become. Starting out as a project with the sole purpose of expressing the binary between NFT and ancient art practices, it has over time become a multifaceted, multi-sited contemporary installation. The scope is continuously evolving and for both Lesley and I, it has been a dramatic learning curve as we delved into the depths of the crypto verse without any prior experience of this unfamiliar jurisdiction.

The final chapter of this trilogy will be a showing of Lesley’s full-scale painting, on display in the South Transept of Exeter Cathedral. Where we are showing Lesley’s magnificent work in the flesh for the first time in the series, we can see it is remarkably larger than the past virtual viewings and offers a physical recentring of the altarpiece. It’s dispersal through panels, medium and place circles back to its reconstructed tangible state and perhaps most notably in its most sacred site. It will bring to question how we alter our approach to temporal factors, as we have departed from a site of exchange to place of absolute holiness.

As the curator this will again stray from the previous showings of the Duccio. We will have to consider how to the audience will be alerted to the allegory with a refreshed lens, the contemporary colour palette and newly formed provenance of the piece bring this ancient masterpiece firmly into the contemporary realm. Where medium and sensual interaction was a fundamental element, perhaps through the fresh insertion of the digital medium, today’s audience will be able to visually consume the piece with the same depth as the era of its construction. And so, in consolidating both the physical with the metaphysical, Lesley’s, and by extension Duccio’s, altarpiece’s linear provenance has been forever altered into an entirely new paradigm.

This installation will be on view in the Cathedral from September 26^th.