Alasdair Duncan has been making art with what he doesn’t know. Or is it art about what he doesn’t know? How does one talk about what it is that one doesn’t know? It’s a problem in so far as words in their signifying effect are not entirely adequate to this task - at best they convert a little of the unknown into something known, but then it becomes something else, something known, the unknown as such is gone. One might try to make signs of some sort as stand-ins for whatever it might be that isn’t known. And this has been the approach that Duncan has sought for some years. 

Duncan pushes formal and associative equivocation in his art as a way of trying to get at what’s not known without making it something known. It’s the method of a here and a there, where when you look here it must be there, and vice versa, so that the unknown is figured in terms of a neither here nor there - a kind of something where there should just be an absence.