Sri-text on method

I’m currently based in Rotterdam, but previously I was based in New Zealand, where I grew up. I think New Zealand’s extreme geographic distance from any kind of main art center has had quite a big impact on my work. There’s a Modernist painter from New Zealand named Colin McCahon—he’s someone you learn about all through both high school. He often uses black and white in his paintings, and I always wondered if this had to do with the fact that when he was working, the only way he could gain information about what was being made overseas was through books with black and white images. Original works often never make it down to New Zealand because no one can afford to bring them there, so artists only ever see work that is mediated through books (and now the internet). So when Colin McCahon was painting the only way he got to see work was through black and white photocopies and reproductions, which I found really interesting. This is something that I’ve always played on and been aware of, that my source material is being mediated through the second hand images and text of these larger art centers.

The Stranger's House is a single piece of fabric with no seam lines, 12 metres across and 4 metres high. The fabric is a natural canvas that has been painted with black paint, using large, thick brushstrokes. The brushstrokes form an image that is abstract, and because of the use of black paint on un-primed canvas the image appears as a drawing, having no colour blocking, only outlines. There are also drops of black paint that have been roughly covered over with white paint. These cover-ups are visible when one moves close to the canvas, but disappear when the canvas is viewed from a distance, which the space the canvas is hung in enables a viewer to do. The canvas hangs about 10cm away from the wall, and is attached to the ceiling of the gallery. A chain inserted into a seam at the bottom weights the fabric and ensures that it hangs completely flat with no curves or buckles. The canvas is positioned between two doorways, meaning the viewer must walk past the work to enter and or exit the space.

The painting of this backdrop was executed by a theatre scene painter, using an A4 scan of a sketch for a theatre design by the artist Sydney Nolan. This scanned drawing was re-sized using photoshop so that it would fit the dimensions of the space once it was up-scaled in the process of transferring it to canvas and paint. A decision was made to replicate the drawing in its entirety—including the wings and floor—on the one surface, rather than just extracting the backdrop. The completed backdrop was installed using techniques identical to those that would be used in the theatre.

A few years ago, I came across a design for the stage set of the Ballet Russes' 1940s production of Icare by the Australian painter Sydney Nolan. The design itself was never realised as Serge Lifar, the director at the time, was put off by Nolan's concept of a stage set that the dancers would potentially become lost in through the use of black and white abstract patterns on both backdrop and costumes. While Nolan was hoping to explore the point at which distinctions between static art and dance might collapse, Lifar was still obsessed with the primacy of dance. Recently I was asked to make a show for a gallery in Sydney. My initial plan for a performance fell apart due to the failure of myself and the dancer I was working with to find a productive space between 'art' and 'dance'. While reflecting on this failure the Nolan design came to mind and I decided to pursue this connection. The gallery itself has a contemporary collection that is heavily represented by male artists, Nolan in particular. This also influenced the decision to take something from the practice of an iconic Australian male artist in a way that could read like the breaking and entering of a stranger's house—taking something that was not my own and pulling it into my own practice. This idea of 'breaking and entering' is reflective of how I sometimes feel as an artist who happens to be female when considering the history of art as one dominated by western males. I was also interested in the idea of a backdrop—a thing that is almost a painting, almost an object, in need of the presence of a body to activate it, to fulfil its use function, to complete it.

This is a series of objects, each made from a single piece of marble and a single piece of white, air-dried clay. These were positioned on the walls of the gallery at varying heights: two positioned close to a corner roughly at eye level, the other close to the ground. The forms vary in size, but each lies somewhere between 40cm wide and 30cm high. The marble acts as a support for the clay, and has been cut from white marble in lines that curve in half circles, or something that looks like a wave or perhaps a stylised cloud. The edges of the marble are smooth and sharp, and each piece is positioned tightly against the wall. The clay sits on top of the marble, and mimics its contours, however, there are gaps between the marble and the clay, where the materials no longer meet. These gaps make the relationship between the clay and the marble appear rather precarious, and there are parts where the clay only just balances on the marble.

The marble forms were taken from collages that explored the translation of movement and gesture into form. The resulting shapes cut from paper resembled a sort of script or hieroglyph. These forms were scanned and turned into vector diagrams and then cut out of pieces of white marble. White, air dry clay, cut into long rectangular strips, was laid over these marble forms and left to dry. This drying process took about a week, during which time the clay shrank, pulling towards itself and away from the marble that had been acting as a support structure. Gaps opened up between the two materials, the clay only now balanced on the marble at various pressure points.

I was interested in creating objects that used a hard surface to support a soft surface, which could also be read as a soft surface mimicking a hard surface. At the same time I was writing instructions for a performance and was thinking about the motifs and ideas present in these texts—the translation and mimicry of objects and phenomena through movement that might trace an empathy between things, patterns of breathing that might be part of this process of translation, and objects and phenomena from the park surrounding the gallery the work was being made for; in particular rocks and clouds.

A score made from 7 pieces of A3 white paper, on which a text has been photocopied. These pages are of portrait orientation, positioned side by side, horizontally across the wall, using clear plastic stationery pins. The first page carries the title of the work and so could be read as a title page. In three of the pages two bodies are identified as Dancer A and Dancer B, using the pronoun ‘she’ or the possessive form ‘her’. These bodies are described as enacting three different performances that transcribe a movement through the gallery and into the gardens outside. The last pages present instructions for breathing exercises that appear directed specifically to the viewer. These text pieces use a type face that has been interrupted by marks made in pen using proof-reading symbols, additions, and patches of black that delete portions of the text. There is also a thin line that looks like a hair in the last three pages, appearing in a slightly different position each time.

I wrote texts or directions for five different performances, or actions that could potentially take place in the gallery and surrounding gardens. These texts developed out of a site visit to the space where I spent time walking in and around the gallery and the gardens. The final texts were typeset with the help of a designer and then printed out. I discovered mistakes and changes in these print-outs and with the designer's suggestion I corrected these printouts in pen using proof-marking symbols. These were then photocopied onto A3 sheets of paper at my local photocopy shop. When I looked through the photocopies I saw that a hair belonging to the girl copying the texts had been left on the machine. This appeared as a thin black line whose position shifted slightly with each new copy. I had run out of paper and had no time to buy more, so ended up deciding to use these ‘failures’. The girl still charged me for these copies.

The ideas present in these texts had been talked over with the dancer I was working on to create a performance for the gallery. When this collaboration fell through I revisited the ideas through text. My initial idea for the performance had been based on an anecdote I heard about Colin McCahon, an iconic New Zealand modernist painter, getting lost in the gardens and being found a day later in another park with no memory of what had happened, or how he had got there. I had hoped to extract something from this anecdote by working with the dancer on a piece that explored simple ideas of walking without a set direction, the convergence of outside and inside and the border of a performance—when it might begin and end. These ideas were carried into the potential performances described in the texts, coupled with ideas influenced by an exercise described in Simone Forti’s book Handbook in Motion where Steve Paxton attempts to mimic a rock, and Merce Cunningham’s description of choreographing Beach Birds for Camera, where he explored how a rock formation changes and becomes animated through the shifting position of the person looking at it.

A 20min film in black and white, which may be re-edited in the next three weeks to be around 30min. The first shot is of a metal sculpture on which a cockatoo sits. The camera pans around this tableau, the cockatoo following the lens of the camera. The next scene shows a male dancer slowly rotating his torso. The camera tracks his circular movement and pans back to take in the whole space, which is a black theatre box that also contains two large canvases with black shapes stamped onto them that hang from the ceiling like theatre backdrops. The rest of the video uses the camera to track the sculpture, the bird, the dancer, the backdrops and the space. Laid over the top of the video is the voice of a woman reading a French text. If you don’t understand French you might still be able to comprehend the odd word, but the rhythm may become more important than deciphering meaning and your body might acclimatise to the particular pace of the speaker. If you do speak French the text might seem a little odd, with meaning coming adrift because sentences are built around the technique of ‘clanging’ where words are associated based on sound rather than concept. At some points the movements of the dancer and certain words in the text meet through the poses of particular animals described in the text such as rat, bee and chat, concepts which are translated and enacted by the dancer through static poses.

The film originated in a letter written in 1919 by the Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and collated in a book called "The Diary of Nijinsky"; a text that documents the experience of someone entering the early stages of schizophrenia. His choreography performs an abrupt inverse of traditional balletic structure by turning the movements of his dancers inward, rather than outwards. This ruptures the lines of his dancers, creating a greater relationship to the floor/the stage; this sense of physicality highlighted by his use of the stomp within the work. In order to learn this choreography a process of unlearning had to take place—the refusal of a specific tradition of movement that most of the dancers would have been instructed in since childhood. As most of the Ballet Russes' performances were never filmed, many of the original choreographies have been lost. The fact that some have remained reflects the nature of choreography to be transferred from one body to the next, its lines and forms shifting as it encounters each new performer. This letter, called ‘Letter to Mankind’, was read out and recorded as a simple means of creating a score. I worked with a dancer to transcribe/translate this score into movement. The attempt to translate this text became a conversation about the impossibility of translation, and the need to avoid a translation that had a singular form, instead working with ‘attempts’ at translation; smaller exercises or approaches that might present multiple ways of accessing the text. These attempts were developed into choreographies—some simple, others more complex– that were then filmed in a theatre space.

The piece was an exercise in translating something from one form (text) into another—in this case movement.

Two of the objects come from an installation where I had a dancer perform. They were out on this terrace and what I wanted was to create objects that people didn’t know whether they could use or not, but did kind of engage with. One of the objects is based on a set of Yvonne Rainer stairs, so there’s a set of concrete stairs and each step is a different height. With stairs there is always a kind of rhythm: as you’re going up a set of stairs you can judge it and through the repetition you can judge how high to lift your leg. These stairs disrupt that; every step you take you have to think. I wanted them to be made out of concrete to be kind of tempting to the viewer so they’d ask, can I engage with this? Can I sit on it? There was also a volleyball that rolled around the space, which came from an Yvonne Rainer performance as well, and what was really nice was that I’d visit the gallery and some people would be using it and you’d go in and some people would be kicking around the ball and not realizing they were entering the work themselves and using these everyday…like how do you respond to a ball? You use these everyday actions. What I would want for the exhibition was can the viewer engage with it without being told, but to see…it’s about choices I guess. Maybe it’ll be different bringing the sculptures inside. Maybe it won’t set up that relationship. It’s like an intimacy with things—can you touch it, or sit on it…

I think time is a huge part of my work. My work often deals with the body and movement, so of course you then have the time span of a performance. With the works that I’m showing here, some of the sculptures have come from an installation that also included performance, and I wanted to use that performance as part of the material of this installation. So it’s about not seeing the parameters of the exhibition space as closed but rather considering that the choreography that was performed lives on in both these sculptures and the body of the dancer who executed it on site. I’m exploring the parameters of a work beyond its time allocation and presentation, which brings us back again to the notion of these ongoing sculptures that were removed from their original installation on the gallery terrace and now exist in my parents garden. The past is also an important part of my work. I often use documents or images or texts from past performances, so re-activating those documents or archives has become a way of working for me.

I have certain works, though, that are ongoing. For instance I have a couple of sculptures that, in a way, continue on in time and therefore are never finished. These particular sculptures were installed outside of a gallery and now they’re been moved to my parents garden where they sit accumulating leaves and rot on them. I feel like it’s an important part of the process.

I feel like the trace of time is more present than the trace of the human. I only say that because some of these sculptures have been sitting outside, they’ve taken on the imprint of leaves and stuff, which will be kept on them, so time is enacted. But it’s a good question, if you’re wanting a viewer to engage with their body, how can you show that it can be done?

Often with the works I make are not autonomous. I like the idea that works can shuffle around-- that you could have a work that’s three years old but it could still sit with a work that you made today, and they could have a conversation. I feel like there is a borderless quality to my work, a shuffling or assemblage or slipping. The works themselves are not fixed. For this show I’ve pulled together sculptures from three different shows, but all of the sculptures are based on the idea of the prop or the backdrop. So, they’re not really sculptures or props. They sit in limbo. They both, however, share the idea of an object that is part of a system that needs a body to complete it. In theatre, the word prop comes from the word property. A prop is only activated when a person uses it. When you’re holding the prop, it’s your property. But as soon as you pass it on to someone else then it becomes their property. I like this idea of property in relation to a shift from person to person. It’s not about the object being locked away or owned from a distance but rather about the ownership of touch and use. So this shuffling of objects through different installations and their being used in different ways allows you to consider how they have no autonomy. I thought about this idea of installing a show where different shows come together and in using a backdrop, it looks like it could be a theatre space, or a space that needs a body or the viewer to complete or activate it.

I had a friend in school when I was about 12 whose parents were quite wealthy and collected a lot of art, particularly male painters from New Zealand. I remember going round to her house for the first time, and in the hallway they had a huge Colin McCann painting, one of his black and white number series. Their house was super gothic. It was an old villa, really cold, really dark. And then you had this super dark black and white painting with a black background and white numbers painted on to it. I think it was his “Teaching Aids” series, but I sometimes confuse it in my mind with his “Rocks in the Sky” series. We used to put our shoes underneath it when we arrived, so there was this kind of banal relationship to this painting. It acted like the backdrop to this action of taking off and putting on our shows. I remember reading that McCahon wanted to make paintings to walk past, and there is something about motion and the object that is present in my work.