Amerikanische Archäologie, Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, 2007.
Welch’s practice is born of a desire for exploration and discovery. He produces drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos and installations. These works are often accompanied by soundtracks, which draw on aspects of theatre, history, literature and music. The relationships between these constituent parts, which develops and informs the narrative that surrounds the work, explores the slippage between one thing and another, revealing that meaning is always elusive and impossible to harness.
A sense of uncertainty develops as the viewer navigates his installations; multiple references unfold gradually over time ensuring that meaning is perpetually evolving and mutating. Welch uses this area of confusion to investigate the complex, shifting and often contradictory relationships between people and their environments and the links between nature, culture and the commodified world.
His works are made up of forgettable materials that he finds turning the commonplace and mundane into work that is rich with human emotion and fragile beauty. His works are quietly alluring and often suggest a particular function or allude to potential meanings, yet remain evasive through their careful displacement. Welch’s practice is a carefully choreographed series of contrasts; of materials, approaches and intentions. There is a continuous shift in register in which style, subject matter, title, references, relationships between parts and the whole, are played off against each other.
Another aspect of his practice is explored in the seduction of the experience, which is typified in his Orchestrated Moments. This is a collaborative process, which often involves the interaction with artists, craftsmen and random strangers. These moments encompass a particular time and space and are fleeting attempts to create a sense of wonder in the viewer. Orchestrated Moments are only an experience, for example during a studio visit Welch planned to have a musician come in and perform unannounced. These experiences exist thereafter through the viewers’ meditation of it.
Parallel to the practice outlined above, Welch’s attention is also focused on FOUR, a space that he utlises as an ongoing investigation into the production and facilitation of exhibitions by curators and other artists. These seemingly disparate practices are interconnected through an underline consistency of ideologies, which form an eloquent articulation of the artist’s concerns; the interrelationships and interdependence of artists and the system that supports them.
Everything is connected. Through a slow unfolding of memory and association - with references to folklore, history, music, the occult, superstition and theatre - connections begin to emerge. Welch's interest lies in exploring the creative possibilities that the gap between a search for meaning and its attainment can generate.
This text exemplifies the undercurrent that runs throughout much of Welch’s practice. It maybe overlooked, lost in transmission or later discovered by coincidence. The intervention of the work usually invests in the viewer to consider its possibilities.