Turbulent Terrain: Manifestations of the Sublime in Contemporary Art
Stephen Hurrel

Stephen Hurrel is a Glasgow-based artist who completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Hons) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art (Sculpture) at the Glasgow School or Art, Scotland between 1983 and 1988. He has worked in a broad range of media and has produced many installations and exhibitions in the UK, Europe and Australia.

Hurrel’s internet-based installation, Beneath and Beyond (2007), provides a direct encounter with the awe-inspiring forces of the Earth's crust. By tapping into seismic monitoring stations around the world via the internet, Beneath and Beyond accesses the unseen shifts and movements of the Earth's crust. Vibrations from these stations, several of which are located within Australia, are translated into sound arrangements that are broadcast in the gallery and experienced in 'real-time' along with their corresponding visual representations – seismic lines and waveforms.

Writing on the sublime in art in the late twentieth century, Jean-Francois Lyotard analyses contemporary artistic practices as attempts to put forward that which is “unpresentable” through presentation itself. Through its direct and immediate transmission into the exhibition space of the powerful and potentially devastating forces below the Earth’s surface, Hurrel’s work operates within this mode, imparting a profound experience of the unseen forces beneath our feet.

Image: Stephen Hurrel, Beneath and Beyond, 2008, sound and projection, live internet feed