Creating replicas or versions of the figurine is revealing.
Over the last year or so I have been attempting to express ideas about autobiography and the past by making drawings and paintings of objects with personal significance. I am currently focusing my exploration on one particular object – the figurine in the image. This process is interesting as I map out ideas in charcoal and paint but recently it all stepped up a gear when I responded in three dimensions.
I explained to my tutor that I had never been allowed (by my mother) to hold the object as a child for fear of damaging it (sensible move on her part – I was pretty clumsy). My tutor noticed I had taken a photograph of my hand touching the figurine and suggested I explore this physical connection.
Well that was it! I photocopied multiple images of the figurine ( I had previously taken photos from several angles trying to capture its importance – but not touching it!) I found other – non emotionally valuable ornaments and covered them with the image of the figurine (see my last post).
Instinctively I covered them in a very rough way – with no obvious skill or careful cutting or matching up of the image. I scrunched the paper up distorting the image and crudely stuck it together with tape. I wanted to create something that looked rushed and made with a desperation to see an idea manifested . This seems to mirror my strong emotional reaction – of desperately trying to manifest a sense of the past. This process felt like I was re-visiting childhood and I remembered that I had used objects – played with them – moved them around re-ordering them – to make sense of real life scenarios. So here I am working again with the transitional object of early childhood. Experiencing the materiality of it, the physical expression of processing emotions. It feels very powerful as if re-enacting, and very liberating too in the way that play for a child feels completely liberating.
I have collected a few more ornaments from charity shops and am playing with the idea of multiplying the experience of re-enacting and of heightening the significance of the figurine to ‘important’ and ‘valuable’ through replication. The re-processing and identity stealing that goes on with the charity shop ornaments is also interesting – the appropriation that I talked about in my last post – there is a power in this. And I’m thinking about the parallels of covering up and hiding unwanted realities; of reinventing truths.
It puts me in mind of Mark Dions’ work Thames Dig (1999) when thousands of fragments of pottery, plastic etc were extracted from the shore of the Thames and sifted before being displayed as part of Dion’s work in the Tate . Dion and a team of volunteers literally collected things that had come to the surface – naturally sifted to the top. But ‘sifting’ is not purely an act of chance – it can also articulate the way in which we use the memory of past events, places and objects to explain our past and self perceptions. We literally sift through credible material evidence to create our own selective version of the past.
My wrapping of these ornaments is an interruption and intentional sabotage of the chance sifting process to suggest our need to re-invent past events to fit our changing sense of self.
I am currently reading Contemporary Art and Memory by Joan Gibbons
Mark Dion
