It’s been a long time since I last wrote here – almost a month! It’s been an extraordinarily rich month, too, which found me stumbling upon so many enlightening & revelatory things, & wishing that I’d had time to blog about them. It’s Biennial time here in Liverpool, & I’ve seen some wonderful work: Eva Kot’atkova & Nina Canell at the Tate; Sachiko Abe at A Foundation. In Kot’atkova, I found a definitive example of how “community engagement” (that dread buzzword!) can be a valuable and active element of an artwork; the artist’s drawings, mini-sculptures, installations and sketchbooks integrated perfectly with the work she’d done with local schoolchildren, and the whole project, with its many facets and approaches, became an installation in its own right, housed in a hexagon-like, partitioned structure in the centre of the gallery.
Sachiko Abe’s paper-cutting performance (accompanied by a series of intricate, pattern-like drawings) is precisely the sort of thing I love: meditative, unassuming, simple; quietly physical and very elegant. The artist sits, perched birdlike in a sort of eyrie, slowly cutting strips of paper; the space is silent but for the sound of her scissors breaking the fibres. A trail of cut paper leads downward & outward, across the floor; then rises up in a great column, fountain-like. It stands opposite the great brick furnace (A Foundation inhabits a former knifeworks), & mirrors it perfectly; the product of an ephemeral sort of industry.
Canell’s work moved me incredibly. Housed in a small, blue-grey room overlooking the river, her main piece consists of several large test-tubes, suspended from the ceiling like chimes. Each contains a sample of water from the River Mersey, collected from various depths. I visited on a stormy day, with the river undulating wildly beneath us & the rain lashing the window. The simplicity and calmness of the work was deeply lyrical; bewitching. I loved it.
I’m drawn to work like this; work that explores and examines and utilises the material of the world, as it is, unaltered. Canell’s work reminded me of the collecting I would do as a child: stones, seashells, conkers, flowers; leaves & twigs – and, yes, even water (returning to the classroom after a school nature walk, aged 10, I found that I had gathered almost nothing but water, from a stream, & various puddles; fascinated by the properties of the autumn light, different in each). I began to think about this; and I realised that collecting, assembling & positioning has always been a central interest. Historically, with my pen & with my cameras, I have collected moments; things that already existed. My ongoing internet project ‘Gathered.’ (on which I collaborate with Sarra Facey) is a collection-in-progress. I have collected other things, too.
The act of collecting is important; to seek and to observe is to enter and understand what surrounds you; to be fully present within it, or before it. It’s almost heuristic; a therapeutic sort of practice. The act of displaying what you’ve found, of repositioning the thing, is equally vital; lending import to the seeming smallest thing (though nothing is too small to be important); removing things from their everyday context, that we might observe and know and understand them, truly.
This is another method, too, of subverting the ego. When I try to make solid objects, things brand new, I feel abominably pompous. A lot of what I do is about self-effacement or self-removal; to reposition myself as an unseen force, rather than an active participant. This is why I prefer to use cameras that limit my control over the final image – the removal of the operator’s ego allows light to do as it will. It seems more honest. And I have always struggled with the manufacturing of commodities (though my books are an exception; a book, however, does seem manifestly useful) – no object that I could make could ever even approach the rich complexity of the things that I have seen or found, as they are.
I don’t think that art should be a dogma, nor a rigid paradigm. It ought to be (for me, at least) a tool for understanding things; for making sense. A sort of psychic/psychological GPS.
