Mark Titchner: What if this present were the World`s last night

'What if this present were the World’s last night?' by Mark Titchner is a new commission for the South London Gallery’s permanent collection.

The work is part of Mark Titchner’s ongoing series of works inspired by found philosophical texts. Its title and central panel is a quote from John Donne’s Divine Poems, 1633, which Titchner frames with a line from John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849: ‘When we build let us think that we build forever’. The artist has abstracted Ruskin’s words into mathematical binary language, where a zero becomes a black square and the number one becomes a raised coloured square, making the original quote undecipherable.

In keeping with much of the SLG’s contemporary collection, this special commission has a connection to the local area. Both Donne and Ruskin lived in Camberwell and the background of the work shows an abstracted view of the city from One Tree Hill, adjacent to Camberwell New Cemetery.

The commission was funded through an Arts & Business New Partners investment to develop the South London Gallery’s creative partnership with Blackwall Green, who sponsored the exhibition, ‘ShowCASe Preview’, at the Gallery in December 2004. Arts & Business New Partners is funded by Arts Council England and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Mark Titchner
What if this present were the World`s last night?