I really enjoyed showing this work Cabinets of Renegotiation at East Side Projects in their Summer Camp.
There’s always a bit of nervousness inside curiosity when I hand over a work like this, but to be fair, it looked like it would all be ok as I arrived with it relatively late on in the installation. Many other submissions had already been hung and the curation was already looking pretty tender and interesting.
https://eastsideprojects.org/esp/projects/show/
Besides, I had fair confidence in curators Lucy Grubb and Harman Randawa, and art technician Tammy Woodrow who turned out a splendid job of curating my piece. The splendid convergence of yellow lines, which are not part of the work (although they sort of are), are artist/curator co-founder of Eastside Projects, Gavin Wade’s decision to re-stage a Sol LeWitt work throughout the gallery walls. There were also pebbles, just visible in the 2nd photo, arranged throughout the gallery by Lucy Grubb. I felt part of an exposition of scattered harmony.
This version of Cabinets arrives as a kind of kit and a provocation to the curator to take part in a new convergence of objects and humanity. There is a fabric sculpture which is a kind of pillowy representation of the ground that has pockets in it with a wooden dowel that gets screwed into the wall as support. It comes with a wrapped pack of things that I've collected that can stick into the pockets. If I can I try to add something collected on my way to the gallery. They get re-used with this work and another called 'Mapping Sloughing' in a kind of things-go-round sharing deal.
They mostly come from land around my studio, which is near a train station and a retail park. A mass of indistinct people pass through this space but there is also a grand mass of more stable inhabitants in the shape of plants and trees, and other creatures, birds, rodents and insects, most of whom I haven't met. I won't list everything in the pack as I'm not all that interested in their individual naming, but, for example, there are broken zip ties from deliveries and a variety of organic objects like pine-cones and feathers. Together they are stuffs of lives.
I am interested in their combining and their rearrangement. For this reason, I like serendipity to continue to have a part to play in the work, so I make a point of inviting others into it. On this occasion Tammy appears to have enjoyed fitting in to almost burst as many things as she can. She has made an explosion of stuffs. I think that’s an apt portrait of the ground. However, discord and harmony are both completely acceptable states of being.
Cabinets... is part of a series of similarly titled works inspired by an abiding interest in curiosity cabinets, also called wunderkammer, of the type of polished wooden glazed cabinets displayed inside homes. They were sort of domestically-situated museums, wildly popular with upper-class Europeans of the seventeenth century onwards, in which small objects were displayed to express a curiosity in other cultures, lives and places. Notably the mechanic of display separates the objects from their complex myriad contexts and brings them into new relationships. And, because sometimes these were objects brought back from lands colonised by European countries wunderkammer have become loaded with hugely problematic meanings around hierarchies, extractive geopolitics and racialised attitudes, detail which is far beyond the scope of this short post (Hannah Pethen offers a short survey from a contemporary Egyptologist p.o.v.) However, the expression of control combined with factors of curiosity and invitation to discourse which at the same time de-situates things contains some parallels with our attention to waste, and this attention, or rather inverted-attention interests me.
It has always confused me that the current wave of humxnity that I live in struggles so much with our unbreakable bond to objects. We don't attend to them. We plainly experience the damage made by things we no longer want to use and still do nothing. We often don’t know what comprises objects. I wonder if, in trying to draw comparisons to this attention attitude we might find clues to how we can do better with the fascinating things we call waste, litter, trash, etc.
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