Elena’s comment on yesterday’s blog has got me thinking again about why I feel it necessary to work in a repetitive, museum format. This is a tendency that was always there in my work but has grown until now I instinctively think artistically in repetitive museum formats.
My practice, which has evolved along interdisciplinary lines, is now underpinned and referenced by Memory and Memorial; in part a citation to family members lost in the Holocaust.
There are certainly echoes of labeling and cataloguing my childhood nature museum in the repetition and museum style presentation of my work nowadays, and I have become very aware of how museum style presentation changes perception and expectation of a work.
Certainly my work has become more controlled. My perception of myself as artist is now one of assimilator, controller and curator. Integral to my work is an initial word based research period – amassing a filofax of facts. This has become almost a mantra, a security blanket, a calming period during which my thought processes float above the physical job of filing facts.
This becomes a process of curation; archivings of loss are ordered by me as collector, creator, and final arbiter. There is then a metamorphosis into form which is again archived, collated, tagged for view and presented in museum linked formats.
It is this final presentation that can transmut the object’s aesthetic into something more than the sum of its parts.
Appropriating the role of the museum as both a mirror of the past and an institutional voice of present authenticity exposes tensions inherent in the multi-layered narrative or fabricated mythology that I often use.
The language of the museum will also intervene, control and contain the primal energy associated with loss and reflect it back to the viewer. Which is interesting. Maybe it all goes back to not wanting to confront the pain of my mother who survived the Holocaust?
In installation work I nearly always use both found and made materials. This seems to hint at a struggle between control and letting go, as does the use of the personal – the human story always being defiant of a clinical, neatly- wrapped museum presentation and outcome.
So – I glimpse the reasons for my need to work in this way – until, like a unicorn in a forest- they slip out of sight just as I approach some understanding. Meanwhile I continue my hunt for museum boxes as they get ever more expensive………….
