Most of Them (full text: ‘most of them are ghosts, the rest are premonitions’) follows Etchells’ interest in the power of language to create fictional events, images and characters. In the artist invokes an absent set of ambiguous figures, some of which, the language insists, are ghosts (i.e. insubstantial or former-beings), while the rest are premonitions (ie beings or creatures which have yet to fully appear). In its playful act of summoning the work meanwhile underscores the reality of everyday present experience – trapped as it is between echoes of the past and the emerging traces of a future that has yet to arrive. It’s a portrait of present-ness haunted by what precedes and what will follow it, as well as of a present moment that is crowded with echoes and possibilities.

About Tim Etchells’ neon and LED works
Etchells’ neon and LED pieces often draw on his broader fascinations as an artist, writer and performance maker, exploring contradictory aspects of language – the speed, clarity and vividness with which it communicates narrative, image and ideas, and at the same time its amazing propensity to create a rich field of uncertainty and ambiguity.