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Sat 9 December – Sun 28 January 07

Melanie Jackson

Road Angel

Melanie Jackson explores how ideas, people, products and raw materials circulate and then settle in our increasingly mobile world. Shown here for the first time, her major new animated work, A Global Positioning System, 2006, deconstructs a hand-held GPS satellite positioning unit, tracing each component part back to its source. In this way, Jackson reveals a tangled odyssey back to the rubber trees of Sri Lanka, the tin mines of Congo, and the production lines of China. The film and accompanying poster produce a complex map of locations, processes, materials and labour, all brought together in a hi-tech consumer product, designed to locate the position of an individual in the world.

Her sprawling installation Some Things You Are Not Allowed To Send Around The World, 2003 (commissioned by Matt’s Gallery, London), comprises of hundreds of intricate, hand-made architectural models constructed in minute detail from international newspaper pages. Amongst this

Lilliputian landscape sit a number of videos – footage of Hong Kong’s Filipino servant community. This transient workforce come together each weekend in the deserted financial district to socialise and chat in their native tongue. In contrast to these images and symbols of migration and mobility, Jackson has produced a poster which exhaustively lists the diverse (and often bizarre) items that cannot be sent around the world: Algeria – Funeral urns, watches and clocks.., Germany – Playing cards, USA – Goods originating in Cuba, North Korea or Vietnam…

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