"SILK" (1): in silk-master's house, 5 & 3 Princelet Street, Spitalfields, London / torn red raw silk / 7 Mar 2001 to 29 Apr 2001
I had the idea that I would bring back silk and memories that would bind
India to a Spitalfields silk-master's house. In the Meenakshi Temple in
Madurai, in an enormous stone hall seemingly built by giants, a stall
holder - under a black statue of Kali draped in an emerald sari - sold me
40 metres of red raw silk wrapped in a bin-liner and string ... bought
as pouring rain was flooding the stone gullies and swilling the streets
in manure!
I tore the silk into strips, which frayed and tangled, and wove an
environment like the cables that straddled every roadway and knotted their
way round every telegraph pole.
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"SILK" (2) : in silk-master's house, 3 Princelet Street, Spitalfields, London / torn red raw silk / 30 Apr 2001 to 17 Jun 2001
After its residence in the 'Five Princelet Street Gallery' - part of the converted ground floor of a silk-masters house, Silk was reinstalled in the adjoining unconverted silk-masters house.
Number
3 was a private house whose large street-level shutterless windows
afforded direct viewing of a small front-room, a pink pannelled wooden box
used for 'art' displays (usually extraordinary flower arrangements). These
houses rise straight from the pavement and this room was too noisy and
public to use domestically. In it the piece was re-hung, differently of
course: further off the floor, more 'helpless and captive', lit at night
and to be viewed from the pavement by passing voyeurs (in Princelet Steet
tourists always peer into these museum-like houses, wondering 'what
lives here' !).
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"CROWN
OF THORNS" : office-reception
installation /
plate-shards / Jun 20
The
only source of natural light into this office space was from overhead
windows. Here plate-shards (selected from the same group as
"Inbedded") fringe the sky-light directly over the
Admin-Reception area at the institution's public entry.
It had a threatening presence and thus - via an ensuing brouhaha -
the life span of a may fly!
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"LOVE ROLLS" : Tate "Bankside Browser" / torn-up love letters bound with wire / Apr 1999
Prior
to its opening the Tate Modern ran events that established its artistic
presence. One such was the "Bankside Browser", a public archive
that could be accessed physically and via the web. The brief required a work that fitted an archive
box and could be handled by the public. I chose to work with love letters I'd received. These were problematic to me - most of all I mistrusted their sincerity. I tore them into strips and rolled them up, securing them with dress labels and pins (I was making wedding dresses when we met) and bound them all together with spikey wires. The visibility of the author's hand made me concerned that placing such intimate letters in a public place risked our friendship!
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"COOPERATION-INSTALLATION"
: Art-House Gallery, London
SE14
/ installation made of
paintings /
21 Jul 1999 to 14 Aug 1999
I've taught an autistic man
for 4 years. By 1999 he had produced hundreds of paintings. To celebrate
his energy and talent I decided to use these paintings as the 'raw
material' for a gallery installation. They manifest vigorous action and
colour, and do not lend themselves to being framed and hung. I used each
whole painting as a 'mark' in a huge composition encircling the gallery
walls. I worked on the installation in-situ like a 'painting', changing
and rearranging it in the process of finding a definitive form.
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"INBEDDED" :
private education institution, Bloomsbury, London
/ plate-shards and
spot-lights /
Apr 1999 to Aug 2000
From 1995, in response to painful emotions and broken relationships, I
smashed plates and installed the sharp shards in site-specific locations
in buildings. "Inbedded" covered the single-bed sized 'roof'' of
the landing WC in a private educational building in Bloomsbury. The piece changed through the day from a
translucent rice-paper white glowing with internally scattered light,
connoting a purity and beauty that was absent from its thick-carpeted
kitsch environment; through evening pink, to a melting hot red at night
signalling brothel-sensuality.
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"REFLECTIONS"
: Counselling room, Fetal
Medicine Unit, St Georges Hospital, London - ( Rose and Blue exhibition )
/ mirror off-cuts,
wire, clay, paint, furniture / Nov 1997 to
Nov 2000
The
counselling room was drab small windowless - the most unsuitable place to
be given bad news. I changed its furniture and colour, and on its end wall
assembled mirror-glass off-cuts to give a sense of depth breadth and
light. I wanted to provide the missing window - the glass evoked an
imaginary townscape view. To ameliorate the harshness of reflection I
overhung the mirror with strings of porcelain 'roses' bound by and hanging
on twisted wire - an image between pain and reassurance.
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INSTALLATION
: room in Olive Morris house, Camberwell Rd - (Southwark Open -
curated South London Art Gallery) / plate-shards
/ Nov 1995
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"REJECT
FLOW" : installed at
various locations factory-reject plates refired with torn transfer-glaze
/ May 1995 ---
These plates with their red glaze stripe were made in response to my failure to conceive a baby. Their assembled shape relates to the location and their sequence is pre-determined by the stripe. They have been shown in a number of galleries as a floor piece (firstly Riverside Studios "Angels and Mechanics" 1996), and most recently as a wall piece directly relating with others' works (Christie's, London - 2000).
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