Mark Harris’s Continuous Series of collages, prints and sculptures (Movement, Defence and State) was initially influenced by the global architectural visions of the 1960s – in particular the Italian architect group Superstudio and Constant Nieuwenhuy’s New Babylon.
Works from his Continuous Movement series examine the production and consumption of printed matter, tracing its material status through mass-production into potential extinction. Unwanted books have been re-appropriated and brought back, again, into the multiplied form of the print. In his Continuous Defence and Continuous State series, respectively, he explores themes of Dystopian and Utopian landscape and architecture. The latter series – made from book covers – are imagined schemes of future social and political planning.
“There is the history – or more accurately near non-history – of the appropriated images themselves, which for Harris is particularly important. These were pictures on their last journey, unlooked at pages in pulp-destined books. This material was on the point of dissolution, rescued as valueless stuff from the back of a charity shop, and given new value through being worked upon, even partially erased – or chopped up, in the case of the book covers, into a myriad of splinters re-assembled into maquettes.”