| canopy, chora + terminal | |
| parois | |
| a study of duration | |
| genius loci | |
| domes |
The emerging ethos of this current work is focused on the re-configuring of existing spaces through the creation of temporary, mobile architectural interventions. Using a translucent fabric on which I have imprinted traditional architectural images as my matrix, I am able to superimpose new ephemeral structures within the existing. The modular and mutable nature of the scrim can shift in scale and measure depending on the host site. It envelopes the space and binds to create a unity documentingpresence while confirming absence.
Canopy, is a faux ceiling constructed from these modular glyphs. These monumental cloth photographs are like illuminated skins or tracings peeled back from the surface of chosen buildings and then re-positioned, tailored to fit and layered onto the ceiling of each site. In one structure the ceiling was high overhead forcing the viewer to look up. In another installation it was hung low so as to gently touch the head of those entering the space. In addition to subtle changes from site to site, small hand mirrors are made available to viewers encouraging the tracing of intimate, unique reflections and ultimately animating an imagined space. The veiled images, the nomadic re-positioning, and the intimate reflections combine with the existing architecture to become a threshold marking the liminal. They act upon the imagination to contain that which is fleeting making us hyper aware of the ephemeral and the infinite.
chora, an outdoor intervention in the Rose Garden of the Old Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, utilized the three existing large pergolas to create a meditative walkway approx 120' long. Here the modular glyphs were moved from the ceiling to the walls creating a diaphanous translucent breathing enclosure. The enveloping of the site and the rhythmic pulse created by the wind catching in the fabric metaphorically connects the space to the body. The cloth structure is the skin of the space, the body's mediator between the inside and the outside between the private interstitial site of contemplation and the public site of the gardens.
The most recent work Terminal, weaves the mimetic cloth through the columns of a derelict train platform for over 500'. It is loosely attached and engages with the wind to find form. The contradiction between materials, the organza and the iron coupled with the residue of abandonment create a tension, a destabilizing effect on our perceptions and expectations of the architectural site. Architecture transforms the history of our relationship to space. By clothing the platform the site is re-activated with a dynamic energy that invokes the chimeras of the imagination.
The transposition that occurs in all these sculptural installations choreographs space and time. We confront an unknown relationship between distinct spaces, real and imagined. The body's perception is re-sensitized to the architectural meanings and the temporal installation is just an apparition, the afterlife of a visual memory.
While in residence at the Musee Barthete, Boussan, France, a museum dedicated to the collection and presentation of historical tiles and contemporary art, I created an architectural intervention entitled parois. The tiles at the museum became a departure point for the creation of a somatic space. Re-interpreting the designs of several 16th century painted tiles, in clay and in high relief, I then made moulds and cast from these over 4000 tiles in a natural beeswax. These were then used to tile an entire room at the museum. A raised skin of beeswax enveloped the site and compelled the spectator to touch while the smell filled the volume of the space. The Utopian overtones and the sheer joy of entering a space comprised of beeswax were soon displaced as the space simultaneously compelled and repelled and was both intoxicating and suffocating. A somatic reciprocity, a boundless disruption between expectations, the spectator and the room ensued. The room was a sensory architecture triggering memories of place, real and imagined, and history both collective and individual.
a study of duration - the encounter
I enter the gallery and the first thing that is noticed is the aroma. The sweet smell of beeswax lingers in the air. I take a deep breath. I look down the long narrow space and observe the unfinished decaying space of the building. Walls crumble, surfaces are scarred, lathe and wires are exposed. In the centre of the space, separate and on an angle I see a large solid monumental wall that houses a fireplace and mirror. Unlike its surroundings it is white, perfect, and beautiful and in one glance it suggests 'home'. I walk towards it but am stopped by the awareness of a smaller structure.
I am standing in front of a vertical stack of white beeswax blocks which measure approximately in scale and height the size of a child. They are smooth and draw your hands to delicately touch the surface. The interior of the top box is illuminated. It glows and reveals the trace of something inside but I cannot see in. The box is sealed. I feel frustrated and anxious. I try peaking through the cracks that leak light but to no avail. I walk around it only frustrated by the traces that can be seen from the exterior. I make out a miniature door, a window, a fireplace, a mirror. I move away and towards the large massive fireplace wall and look back and see the traces emanating from the box becoming clearer but still remaining ambiguous.
I find myself at the massive white wall. I discover that white beeswax envelopes this architecture. It is sealed like the small minimal wax box. But unlike the clean cool exterior of the light box the surface of the large walls are covered in wax that clings to the embossed wallpaper, that drips on the architectural surfaces such as the mantle, the firebox, the crown mouldings and baseboards. The outermost surface of this architecture appears as skin, as flesh but in this state it is impermeable. Everything is sealed except the circular mirror hung above the fireplace.
This mirror reflects but in its reflection I cannot insinuate myself because of its height. What I can see is the decay of the walls of the building being inhabited by this structure. This reflection is mobile and changes as I move. Is this the leak? Is this the portal to the interior? I notice a second reflection, an elliptical sphere of light on the decaying walls of the gallery but it is opaque. I am shadow. I begin to feel there is no entry point.
I round the back of the wall and discover a doubling of the wall, the fireplace and the mirror. They echo but are different in shape and size. They are treated in the same manner. Wax covers the fleshy surfaces. Like the first mirror, the second is open but the reflection is unlike that of the first. This mirror grabs my countenance, it forces my likeness to be immersed in the boundless decay. I am pulled into the centre, into the space of spectres. The facade's beauty becomes disturbing. I am disturbed.
I look away and in so doing I discover a third work. I am persuaded, impelled by the curious collection of white objects in the centre of the small end space of the room. I move closer to discover a pile, a mass of white wax doorknobs. I bend to examine closer. Each one is articulated. Each one offers me touch. My hands reach for the handles. I want to inspect it with my fingers, my skin, my eyes, my nose. I caress one and then another. It is as if I am looking for the perfect one. I become aware of my search. I linger with my thoughts of the collection. Why? I consider the obsessiveness of the production. I contemplate the uselessness of the wax replicas. I think about the threshold and the doorknob as a tool to open the door, to allow passage to the "other side". These doorknobs however could open nothing but their excess speaks of frantic, relentless attempts to locate, to find the one that just might allow passage through. With each repetition the knobs suggest mastery is eventual but the material, the beeswax belies this notion. It becomes a haunting collection, like a nightmare where one's teeth begin to fall in never ending streams.
All three works are beautiful and seductive but as I am pulled into their aura I begin to feel unsettled. Time is encoded in the sealing of the wax. It is pressing and it makes me anxious.
Each of the works in a study of duration incorporates simultaneously the positions of Bachelard and Foucault. doublure presents the fabula, the archetypal fireplace of our childhoods. It may respond to an actual fireplace in our realm of experiences or it may be the nostalgic fireplace from the colouring books of the 'Night Before Christmas' we had as children. Either way it is the fireplace that triggers our response and suggests that we too will be "snug in our beds' safe from all evil waiting the arrival of delight (Santa Claus). It presents an image we carry with us and one we long to return to. doublure however, through the heavy layers of the beeswax seal on all the surfaces, through the positioning of the mirrors, through the opaque or bleak reflections, counters this mythology. We are struck by our somatic responses to the visual apparition. A corporeal language emerges and defies our first reading of doublure as beautiful and perfect. All is undermined and the language we feel is one of "heterotopia".
Likewise, étui plays simultaneously with the ideas of utopia and "heterotopia". It is a miniature room and as Susan Stewart suggests, the miniature is the perfect world. The miniature is both stable and controllable, a world of minutia and detail and as such is a fascination to both children and adults. It is a site, an imaginary room in which all things are possible including utopia. étui however, is sealed and coupled with its wax foundation presents a site of precariousness, of instability and one that cannot be controlled. It is both compelling and anxious. The beeswax exterior is smooth and slippery and at it joints it leaks light which suggests entry but to no avail. Only the trace is knowable. The desire to enter into the perfect interior world is acute as the spectator wanders around trying to make out the shadows, trying to peak through the cracks. This unattainable space is like remembering. Only the trace of memory is available to us and in the trace we can write the utopia while in reality it is the "heterotopia" we experience.
Like the other two works poigner/to grasp engages in the simultaneous relationship between our imaginary sites and the real. The wax doorknobs present the possibility, the promise of the idealized space but they cannot deliver. They are, once held in the hand a trigger for remembering like the "madeleines" of Proust's tea in the garden. They conjure up the past and take us to the emotions of that space and time. But it is filtered and idealized. No real threshold has been crossed. We find comfort in the entropy or exchange. Yet at the same time these doorknobs which are physically manufactured from a material that cannot function and therefore useless, form an uncanny relationship with the threshold. They exist in excess and are evidence of the tireless, relentless quest to cross the imagined threshold, to search for 'home'. They personify our gestures, but they too in their pile suggest bones, a reliquary of sorts.
a study of duration is work that provides a site to project the imaginary and the real not in a binary relationship but rather one of proximity, one where the surfaces or the edges of utopia and heterotopia slip and are permeable, mutable to each other.
Genius Loci, the genius of the place or disorder of the picturesque is a large body of work stemming from my interest in the Utopian "futuristic" Glasshouses and Conservatories dotted throughout North America and Europe of the 19th and 20th century. These structures blend together "old and new nature... palms, pumps and pistons" and are lodged in our collective imaginations as possible envelopes for Eden. For me they are Barthesian sites of loss and desire.
I was initially drawn to these, cathedral like structures by the architectural features, the spaces and volumes, transparency and reflection and the inscription of the condensation on the glass. Soon, however I found myself distracted and seduced by the somatic experiences of the light, the heat and the earthy smells. The magical gardens, the Utopian Eden’s inverting the inside and outside had triggered in me memories and an unsettling desire to be a part of this contained formal order. Once cognisant of my reaction I began to query the roll of these museums in our imaginations as utopian sites where the “idea” of nature exists, where the architecture functions as authority and monument. For within these built environments, nature undergoes a series of sequential shifts- a process of displacement, diminution and transplantation. It conjures up notions of loss and a revision of our collective memory of what is nature, and what will be nature? Are they theatres of loss or theatres of desire? Must there be an oscillation between the melancholy longing and the analeptic hope? Or is there another more porous, blurred, de-focused understanding that encompasses a boundless amelioration?
Genius Loci: Greenhouses and Botanical
Photography becomes the perfect medium for this project as it performs the function of a screen on which to project the simultaneity and instantaneity of the real, the imagined and the remembered. The photographs in this collection correspond directly to the experiences of being on site. They are more than an archive or a catalogue but rather are landmarks of time and place. Images are classified, and arranged in a non linear narrative that functions as a network of correspondences, associations and reoccurrences. They are souvenirs, that trigger both the familiar, singular and collective response.
Trace Laminations, is a suite of photographic negatives mounted on glass.The ghost like images of the work sheds, garden huts, architectural greenhouse structures are the foundation of this series. The glass itself references the glass of the buildings and further finds meaning in the history of photography, as glass was one of the first substrates for negatives. Further, during the civil war in the US and World War I when glass was in short supply, glass negatives were re-cycled and used on greenhouses and other buildings. These images on glass revisit and suggest fleeting remnants of the past.
Felled, is a 28” x 97” composite photograph of a felled tree I came upon in Golden Gate Park This tree mirrors the melancholy nature of photography. It reflects the trace of things that have been and imparts an element of mourning, of time lost, a spectre of before. My intuitive reading of this scene provided the impetus to take a series of sequential images which were later montaged to create the whole. At first I considered a smooth seamless panorama but soon realized that the disjunctive nature of the varied exposures was far more suggestive of the flux and instability of the referent.
Cloche, is the most recent work created under this umbrella of inquiry. It is a large 12’x 9’ double photograph of a Victorian bell jar. The two photographs are installed back to back, and sited in the woods giving the illusion, of an architectural folly. The scale and transparent nature of the glass immediately conjures up the Victorian glass greenhouse whose function it was to create, collect and make spectacle of the magic of the natural and the exotic while in an environment of control and containment. Cloche inverts this notion as the space it encloses is empty. The natural is on the outside and it is only the traces of the seemingly disordered, unruly, uncontained nature that are captured in the reflection. Further, the knob at the top functions as a lens creating an upside down reflection which moves the viewer to consider and contemplate this reversal.
Domes isa series of drawings under the Genius Loci umbrella and consists of a suite of brush and ink architectural sketches of the domes of glasshouses. Beginning with a photograph of the architecture it is then rendered and translated by hand into line onto a light tissue (mitsumata, a handmade Japanese paper). The nature of the line, the choice of paper, the ink, and the puckering all work to describe these canopy like structures and the utopian poetry implicit. They suggest imaginary places and spaces floating without ground. They appear like notes or an archive of possibilities.