About Us

Joy Street, Barnstaple 2025

This project has a rather unusual title based on two seemingly unrelated quotations: "...all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order" by Eric Morecambe, (Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show 1971) and "The world is all that is the case", the opening lines of Ludwig Wittgenstein's, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922 (English transation).

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The work is a part of a series that explores how the juxtaposition of a set range of elements leads to different meanings and elicits different responses from the viewer. 

Eric Morecambe's humorous remark leads us to consider that the world is not simply a collection of objects (or musical or pictorial elements) but that the relationship between them (the order) is both important and, in this case, has a correct set of relationships which his performance has transgressed. But who decides what that correct order is or should be? 

Wittgenstein points out that the world of facts is not simply the sum of its physical objects but that a state of affairs consists of how these objects are combined. As he pointed out in his later works, Philosophical Investigations (unpublished in his own lifetime) meaning is constructed through a series of 'language games' and we understand the meaning of terms through their use, not through an intrinsic predetermined order.

This body of work explores this process of ordering. If there is a 'right' order, it is only temporary and subjective. I want to invite the viewer to play their own language game, to consider what ordering means and what we need to reference in order to determine an arrangement of elements that seems right  – if only for now.

As of November 2025, the work is currently on display in the window of TK Maxx, Joy Street, Barnstaple., North Devon.

Thank you to TK Maxx and North Devon Arts for enabling this presentation.