Harley Roberts

Harley Roberts is a Barnsley born artist & glass bottle factory worker, now residing in Leeds and acting as a director of the artist led ‘Screw Gallery’.

“The transcendence from Grimethorpe to Leeds, lead to believe there was a whole ready-made community. A Gang. A whole crew of semi-feral artists all wanting to pierce the vacuum. In certain lights, Leeds had similar details; vacant houses; the red brick; staple dinners – obligatory pies at the football; Transit vans – ‘wish R lass was this dirty’; the phone boxes with bleached yellow, sun-pissed posters that invite the dead still standing; spoons bent at the end; gable ends; everybody out their tree in grandmas garden-caravan – bank holiday head transplants; ginnels leading to the serine – the whiff of the important anguish of youth; a wheel you didn’t want to fall asleep at; if you go insane, you lose.

The works aren’t cemented in place by the relics of a by-gone age, an era that isn’t ours. From here on out it’s one foot in front of the other, without digging up the past by scraping the heels.

The work is the Idée Fixe of the divertissement of working life and how it functions within an apparatus of desire; the asymptote of a constant. The collapsing of a rhythm, fall or flow. The flesh matter no longer needs to represent or relate, it is a form of experimentation, freeing from its tensional form. If everything is alive, it is not due to its organic or organised state, but, a diversion of life itself. The night shifts perpetually, on the factory horizon.

Gargle. Repeat. Neither offers consolation, we’re all clueless – there’s no time for reification. Easy on the eye, hard to stomach.”