Objects and Spaces

A short essay on objects, adapted from a talk given March 2024

 

I often work with objects. I’m in interested in the functional and emotional cycles of these things. How uses come and go and how change is at the core of all things. What we chose to keep, what we chose to leave behind, what gets found and what gets lost to us.

 

My work presently includes personal effects, and particularly some of those of my daughters, as I think about family life and care, love and loss. Transitions and change; holding on and letting go. Soft toys, keepsakes which they no longer want or need. Or just the stuff cast aside in the course of regular living – hair ties, laces, fluff and tufts from rounds laundry, say. Markers of time and the routines of care perhaps. Also present are small objects – or replicas of the same – passed down from relatives who have passed away. The keepsake. An object with a story or a memory. An emotional placeholder. Maybe mass produced, one of many. Whole or fragmented. Sometimes shiny, sometimes not. Sometimes known, sometimes not. Sometimes emptied or half-emptied of original use function to create room for its new use as a keepsake. But all somehow rendered personally potent. An object with a story or a memory, with the potential for this to warp, fade or be lost over time.

 

Objects to create a context for living and for self. Small-scale personal histories, woven together into an architecture.

 

To these are added found objects that are unknown or strange to me. Collected on my way to somewhere. A travelling material diary. Found as part of the human waste and detritus of the street, things cast aside, or broken free, to tumble and turn in the world, coming to rest in nooks and crannies, before being dislodged and moving on again. Sometimes gathering and collecting with other things. Sometimes not. Often plastic forms which materially will easily out-survive us and our intended use, and now hitch a ride in our organic mass. Each particle holding something of the force and destruction of our extractive industries and desire for things. Catching the eye still as tumbling waste.

 

In my current work I have combined these various objects and materials. I’ve played with how they might be brought together – bound, trapped, wedged, lodged – and how they might then exist or hold themselves. Hiding the known and the highly personal in amongst the unknown and the strange. Creating spaces for all these things and our desire to find what we know amongst all the uncertainty and the unknown. Accumulations of things brought together through repairs, improvised next steps and ad hoc combinations. Hotchpotch architectures of how things really are perhaps, creating and holding space for the past, present and future, people, stories, places. And thinking about the destiny of all these things and wondering, what if we could no longer know what was important and what was not, what was needed and what was not.