- Venue
- The Malt Cross
- Location
- East Midlands
Review of ‘The Middle Place’, featuring Lauren Halford
The act of doing often works towards an outcome, yet there are times where the outcome emphasises and reveals more about the process taken in order to get there. Through actions such as rubbing, stripping, sanding and chipping, ‘The Middle Place’ appears to be an almost obsessive stance at the practical application of an action in process. Whilst there is method, there is also a notion of the handling itself; of touch, tactility and texture. Lauren Halford focuses on the palpable appropriation of material, through both manual and organic means.
In activities such as rubbing or sanding, there is a definite sense of friction, of agitation even, that is created through the manipulation of surfaces. ‘The Middle Place’ merges two differing angles of approach. On the one hand there is a somewhat labour-intensive activity in stripping and sanding wood – an aesthetic that is both rigid and coarse. On the other hand a more intangible, ephemeral fabric threads through the exhibition to soften those edges. A chorus of voices which are repeating and layered like a mantra slowly disintegrate; an organic dissolve into silence and back again. Halford explores the nature of deconstruction whereby material deteriorates, aging and falling apart over its course, either through the natural weathering of time or through man-made manipulation and pressure.
Despite the predominant use of wood, they are injections of something rather more fragile and temporal. A video projection depicts a pair of elderly hands rubbing and folding against each other, the softness and frailty of their surface ever more stark against the hard, solid wood flooring of the gallery. A series of meticulously sanded and smoothed down wooden plinths contrast to the raw and roughly chiselled log sitting in the centre; its exterior splintered across the room, providing a discourse between differing physical processes. An obvious consideration has been made in the conversing textures of works placed side by side, the varied plane of wrinkles and puckered skin almost replicate meandering wood grain and grooves. There is a reference to the physical skin of an object or form, in how its appearance assumes its representation.
Durational means can cause any object to lose their meaning, becoming abstract and alien through a reduction of their conventional context. Words being mere sound, images become mere textures, objects become mere forms. ‘The Middle Place’ seems to allude to this state where object loses meaning, its material and process coming to the fore instead, in order to allow us to appreciate them as a collection of rather more abstract characteristics. What lies beyond the act of alteration, seems to be a fixation with familiarisation. Altering in this case is not necessarily an intention deemed to render something further from its original, but in fact an attempt to become closer to understanding its original. That, appears to be an ongoing and continuous process in itself.
