Concluding Notes
Zanci Station: exploded diagram extends the lineage begun with ‘I’ve come a long way’ and continued through WIRE; via them we can trace a shift from the interior and the personal to the social and historical. Context is no longer psychology turned outwards; rather, social and geographical context collapse into a single continuum. In so doing, the figure disappears altogether to be subsumed and contained within the site, one story amongst many, and, as outlined in this exposition, a paradoxically deeper sense of recognition emerges.
The arc described across these three installations demonstrates the measures I took as I strove to shift audiences away from the vacuous ‘safety’ of the screen. Importantly however I too was shifted. The narrowing of the field of my vision, the refining of detail that is mirrored equally in the content and form of my work has revealed that the more closely I look at less, the greater abundance I find. Not only did it require an embodiment of myself as artist beyond the phantasms of the screen but it also extended into the demands for a ‘performed environment’. The physicality of place required an engagement with the physicality of the body. Importantly, I went ‘there’. I did not merely read ‘about’ the places in which I made work. Rather, I went and negotiated it in some form with my body: I climbed it, walked across it, looked closely at it, felt it in my hands.
My body is then in the aggregate of the material world, an image which acts like other images, receiving and giving back movement, with, perhaps, this difference only, that my body appears to choose, within certain limits, the manner in which it shall restore what it receives. (Bergson 4)
Artworks such as ‘I’ve come a long way’, WIRE, and Zanci Station: exploded diagram show my body’s negotiation with places: they are a record of it. The artworks are a vital record of proximity and engagement, of locating and negotiating these places with my body. The places in question were not regarded or engaged with as neutral or untrammelled. I have very deliberately set out to deal with place as contested and contradictory. Perhaps unexpectedly, the means by which I have been able to image that abundance of social and historical detail is in the primary source of the physical environment itself.
