This is the work.
There can be no resolution if matter and bodies have no outer limits.
What I will try to explore is the resonance, the connections, the aftermath, the energy, the way objects fight back, blur at the edges, dissolve, transmute. Active verbs, not being so much as doing.
That’s a performance- an uncertain performance?- “on the edge of installation and performance”.
My earlier pieces were often textual. Inscribed on a surface. Words, symbols, objects that were tokens, measures. Constructions, contextual, tying a person to a space, place and time. Linking the physical body to a point in history, as if the individual was a combination of elements of script and setting.
Cyanotypes create a relationship between the object and its existence. Its cast shadow, evidence of being, of having its moment in the sun.
The Garret is a kind of stage but isn’t the locus of performance- is itself the performance. It is the act of having been, of being captured, a mirror, a shadow, a set of memories – the work sets out to tell us what such a thing as a Garret is, and what it does.
A dead human body is the same. Disconcerting, both here and gone, shimmering with the mystery of what and where the boundary between life and death was. We know that mechanically speaking,the heart stopped. But the warmth didn’t leave. Our senses still recognised the person lying there. But there’s silence. Mechanically it was abrupt. Mid sentence even. But in another sense it was a slow creep, a gradual backing out of a doorway, a dissolution. There are still the messages, written and spoken. Some messages arriving just too late, as if the senders thought a few minutes wouldn’t make a difference, but in this case it does, as the channels of communication are now closed down. There are some sharp boundaries.
A body of work can stop talking too. Or stay quivering.
Christian Watt could remember the precise moment “I lost my reason”. She struggled to hold onto it but “it smashed like a butter dish on the floor.” Change of state. Physical or chemical? One that could not easily be reversed. The leaving of one form of existence and the entering of another, suddenly, with a flash of light, a crack of thunder, a shock.
Uncontained 