Tris Vonna-Michell
‘The Art of Clockmaking’
25 April to 27 June 2025
Moon Grove is pleased to present ‘The Art of Clockmaking’, an exhibition by artist Tris Vonna-Michell (born 1982). For twenty years, Vonna-Michell has employed analogue and digital technology alongside innovative approaches to installation that encompass performance, sound poetry, printed matter, sculpture, photography and film. Through a new trans-generational approach, Tris’ father E. E. Vonna-Michell’s (1950–2020) photographic and publishing projects from the late 1960s onwards are now also being shown alongside and integrated with Tris’ recent works.
In 2021, Tris received two-hundred and forty-four boxes of material that his father had accumulated, many of which contained unfinished works, research material and indeterminate objects. E. E. had been involved with counter-cultural artistic movements including auto-destructive art, expanded cinema, sound poetry, and the British poetry revival movements. Through his publishing house Balsam Flex, he worked and collaborated with artists such as Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, and Allen Fisher, Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, to create innovative artists’ books and recordings. Examples of material found in E. E.’s boxes included numerous large-format camera components and abstract photographs, which had been deliberately crumpled, left unprotected, scratched and contaminated, as if to be found later and decoded. In this resistance of the creative possibilities offered by such photographic apparatus, Tris perceived parallels with his own work: an encounter with contradiction, abstraction and renewal in archival and time-based media.
This exhibition comprises a small number of discreet and intimately connected rooms that include E. E. Vonna-Michell’s work within the context of Tris Vonna-Michell’s own archive and characteristic performative, sculptural, filmic installations. The result is a series of meticulously interconnected narratives that consist of multi-generational aspects of sound poetry, artistic publishing and countercultural moments, set within the domestic context of a family home.
In concrete terms, as one enters the gallery, the first work encountered is Boxed Matter (2022-2025), a slide installation showing images of Balsam Flex artefacts combined with a collection of photographs taken by Tris in late 2023 that show E. E.’s publications held at The British Library’s collection in London. This imagery is shown with a sound piece made in collaboration with the artist and oral historian Laura Khan Mitchison, recorded on a walk along the River Thames, which takes the listener through London locations familiar to E. E. and Tris, featuring an interpretative reading of Tris’ photographic collages.
The psychogeographic nature of the sound piece, alongside its productive entangling of personal accounts evident in E. E.’s texts and Tris’ collages, is also present in the photographic and film series shown in the exhibition. Nudging & Spooling (2023–2025), for example, consists of digitised film transfers from 8mm, 16mm and photographs by E. E. and Tris. Demonstrating what Tris terms ‘a certain technological alchemy’ in the aperture or interstice between practices, the work contains slow screen recordings of high-resolution scans belonging to Tris’ photographic collages Collections & Collaborations (2023–2024) alongside 16mm footage of his hand rummaging through boxes. Collections & Collaborations (study I) (2023), meanwhile, shown in Moon Grove’s dining room, consists of photographic prints made using a large format camera, the result of a long process of collating E. E.’s archive. These images comprise constellations of material ranging from artworks, personal and anecdotal ephemera, political or propaganda brochures, newspaper clippings and artefacts.
Essentially, through Tris’ activation of his father’s collection, which casts myriad archival viewpoints in a montage of personal identity, ‘The Art of Clockmaking’ folds ideas of time onto tropes of doubling and the uncanny in literature and art, to enable new readings of historical material. One can claim that Tris’ form of trans-generational authorship also stimulates ideas of cultural ancestralism, where a process of intuition or a mongrel system of knowledge serves to scramble any easy idea of art history or contemporaneity through duration and lived experience. This complicated familial context allows new artistic identities to emerge and is one sought by Moon Grove’s ongoing programme, which aims to engage with intimate subjects that might develop new forms of curatorial and artistic knowledge.
‘The Art of Clock Making’ is the second iteration of a two-part project, the first of which, ‘Vonna-Michell’s House’, curated by Anja Casser and Andrew Hunt, took place at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany, between September and December 2024.
Moon Grove would like to thank The Audio and Visual Fund Oslo (Arts Council Norway), Badischer Kunstverein, Tomas Chaffe, João Chaves, Stephen Cleary, Henrik Follesø Egeland, The Elephant Trust, Galleria Francisco Fino Lisbon, Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse, IASPIS, Laura Kahn Mitchison and On the Record, Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, Richard Morrissey, Jan Mot Brussels, OCA (Office for Contemporary Art Norway), Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and T293 Rome.
Tris Vonna-Michell is based in Stockholm. His work can be found in public collections such as Serralves Museum, Porto; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); Centre National Des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) Paris; Tate Modern, London; and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Vonna-Michell was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2014 and has exhibited widely in museums, biennales and galleries, most recently at Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen and Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2024).