exhibition text continued…
"We live a companionable life; myself, the chair, the chair, the little red table; the dining-table, the window, the waste-paper basket; the horrible curtains and the houses across the street. We conduct no conversation, but our silence is amicable. And this is how it is with the things that surround us. We look at them, but we no longer see them. They do not speak, and we do not hear them. They are dumb objects – their forms, which are their souls and very voices, obscured by function, worn away by familiarity.
And sometimes they grow old and tired and frail, and we forget that we had loved them and cast them away, for a new one can always be bought. And sometimes we lose them, or perhaps they leave us, slipping mute and invisible away; and we seek for a while and we pine for a while – but a new one can always be bought.
But what becomes of our old things? What are the after-lives of objects? They, scattered seedlike, take root in a state between being and not-being; a strange, penumbral space. We understand that a broken mirror is not a mirror. The naming of objects is truly the naming of uses, which glare upon the surface, so that we cannot reach nor even see the solid thing beneath the name. When a mirror is no longer a mirror, what is it? We might call it useless.
The exhibition Dumb Objects unpicks the relationship between use and identity. In liberating broken and commonplace things from their usual contexts, the artists permit them to speak in new voices, to take on new forms; to fledge, to emerge, like butterflies or birds. A reminder that all things are mutable, all things are possible; that even the most solid or broken of things may shift its shape; may live again: an act of ordinary magic."
Jo Moore
2009
Thanks Jo!
