Darren Almond Portrait, 2005 Photo: Richard Dawson Darren Almond audio guides

Darren Almond uses sculpture, film and photography, and real-time satellite broadcast to explore the effects of time on the individual. Harnessing the symbolic and emotional potential of objects, places and situations, he produces works which have universal as well as personal resonances.

Ideas about memory permeate much of Almond’s work. The four-screen video installation shown here, If I Had You 2003, focuses on the personal memories of his widowed grandmother. Almond filmed her as she revisited Blackpool, where she had spent her honeymoon, for the first time since her husband’s death twenty years earlier. She watches a lone couple dancing in the famous Tower Ballroom. The soundtrack combines a gentle piano melody with sliding footsteps, discernible in each corner of the gallery. Their circular movement echoes the turning sails and creaking mechanism of an illuminated windmill from Blackpool’s promenade; Almond’s poignant metaphor for the reality of passing time and the inevitability of death.

Darren Almond Meantime 2000 Steel sea container, aluminium, polycarbonate, computerized electronic control system and components Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London) and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York © The Artist enlarge		Darren Almond Terminus 1999 Aluminium, glass, paint and plastic (Two bus stops) Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn. Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London), Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Gallerie Max Hetzler, Berlin © The Artist enlarge		Darren Almond If I had you 2003 Palazzo della Ragione, Milan Produced by: Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan. Photo by: Marco De Scalzi. Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London), Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Gallerie Max Hetzler, Berlin enlarge
Darren Almond If I had you 2003 Turner Prize 2005 exhibition © Tate 2005 enlarge		Darren Almond If I had you 2003 Turner Prize 2005 exhibition © Tate 2005 enlarge		Darren Almond If I had you 2003 Turner Prize 2005 exhibition © Tate 2005 enlarge

But, as always, Almond himself refrains from moral comment. As in his other work, such as the oversized mechanical flip-clocks, live-feed images of alien and empty locations, or bus-shelters transported from Auschwitz, we are left to respond to his powerful symbolism. Themes of love and memory engage us on a visceral level, emphasising human vulnerability: ‘the vulnerability of yourself against time.’

Darren Almond has been nominated for his exhibition at K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

Darren Almond comments on his work If I Had You MP3 1.11 MB

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Massimiliano Gioni - champion - on Darren Almond MP3 869K

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Kate Bush on Darren Almond MP3 784K

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