"SILK" (1): in silk-master's house, 5 & 3 Princelet Street, Spitalfields, London / torn red raw silk / 7 Mar 2001 to 15 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 / 7 Mar 2001 to 15 Apr 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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"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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"REJECT
FLOW" : installed at
various locations factory-reject plates refired with torn transfer-glaze
/ 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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