Could you explain what drew you towards the two collections, 1.0068 and 1.0023 and how you started to navigate the early stages of your research?
Each of these two archives preserves a record of a family’s travels, but through different means. The first archive is predominantly visual, captured through photographs and video; the other holds letters, diary entries, and other written material. In a way, each archive is somewhat blind to a portion of what the other presented: either imageless or uncaptioned. Viewing and interpreting both functioned as a kind of double vision, in which the narrative of one set could be illustrated by the unrelated photographs of the other.
The dizzying sense of inertia one gets from tracking the movements of the family from the Netherlands through to Australia and beyond blurs with, and even makes a sort of sense within, the other family’s photographs. The images of Venezuela, Qatar and Nigeria show strangely lit scenes of prizewinning orchids dramatically staged near saturated yellow window screens, brass bands leading cacophonous parades, or travellers-by-camel hesitating at the outskirts of an airport. Although the locations are different in each case, the impressions they leave are actually quite similar.
The photographs I was drawn to – landscapes in the Niger Delta from the era when the first oil pipelines were being installed – seem hallucinatory, momentary, and staid all at once. Somehow, they capture the feeling of the slow passage of time, yet also seem immobile, holding still images of construction, labour and activity.
Have you worked with archival material before and if so, could you comment on the importance of responding to historical records within your practice?
I’ve worked with archives and historical images in various ways in the past. In a short-run artist book The Right Eye, I collected sentences from an early version of the script for the 1950s noir film Sunset Boulevard. The script had been heavily edited during production. In this case, the response to the historical record was meant to take a classic piece from the film canon and catch it in the act of being indecisive, self-doubting, revisionist – and to release from the archive a stash of unperformed language.
Although the texts you responded to were in English, your role as a translator, from disjointed memories to physical object, seems key to the creation of these works. How do you approach text, sculpturally, within your practice?
A few years ago, I became quite curious about the words used for titles in satirical newspapers. In politically repressive contexts where it is difficult to speak directly or frankly, the namesakes of these newspapers act to aggravate and irk those in positions of power. They provoke tears, are sharply pointed, and after they’ve left their mark, are difficult to forget: the Hornet, the Porcupine, the Needles, the Nettle, or the Crocodile. A second genre is based on trickster figures like Lúdas Matyi and Eulenspiegel.
I found each of the items associated with these titles and placed them on a table in the gallery. Without the newspapers to contextualise them, they appeared unrelated and ordinary – a quotidian handful of trinkets. At the same time, they were free to conjure other associations and create new, unknown relationships between language and object.
To me, sculpture is always an exercise in language. When viewing art, we are always translating across (and getting tripped up by) the disjuncture from visuals to words.
Your final works, Everything Went Shimmery, are two polyester pieces with a selection of accompanying objects. In the blog post The Life of an Archival Object you describe these works as ‘nomadic’. Could you explain this further?
The works are nomadic in a very literal sense, because their routes go from country to country and city to city, to a series of exhibition spaces. Their parts are also from different origins, including the original photographs from Nigeria that were archived in The Hague: the fabric print, fuses, and electrical accessories that were from California; and a small rock I gathered from my parents’ home in Oregon.
Beyond this, I’m concerned with the archive or storage room as a photograph’s or artefact’s home country, its domestic space. Following this interpretation, an exhibition becomes foreign – a place where an object may not have the same neat and comfortable life it did in the archive. It may be dishevelled and present more poorly than when in its ‘home’. I tried to portray this in the format of the piece.
The two works for Saudade are printed on fabric and must be folded in a certain way after each time they are shown. As a result, the surface of the image will become covered in wrinkles and creased folds each time it is moved, building up a pattern of grids, lines and diagonals that resemble the architecture of the oil rigs. Over time, the images of the landscape will become cloaked by the geometric forms of the energy industry.
Are there any strategies or themes developed during the Saudade project that you are keen to take forward into future works?
Many, but it’s too early to say where they will lead.