Whisper Down the Lane
Gallery 400, UIC College of Architecture and the Arts,
Chicago, IL
July 12 – August 24th, 2013
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Artist’s statement: Submission of work for Whisper Down the Lane at Gallery 400, UIC College of Architecture and the Arts, Chicago, IL
July 12 – August 24th, 2013
The book: The title of this work comes from a reference made by the author W.G. Sebald in his novel The Rings of Saturn, to a book found in Thomas Browne’s Musaeum: ‘King Solomon’s treatise on the shadow cast by our thoughts, de Umbris Idearum.‘ Actually written by Bruno the Nolan, in 1582, de Umbris Idearum dealt with the art of memory: mnemonics.
My work, from which this first chapter (January) comes, combines a ‘remembering’ – it is a record of events kept in a diary – with the search for the equivalent, in literature, of what a shadow might be in pictorial space. As Dennis Hollier has suggested, the only way to produce this shadow-like presence is to embed something of the Real, ‘an index’, within the virtual space of literature.
Hence the “I” that keeps the diary is interrupted (replaced) by multiple “I”s from many different external sources; it migrates through and into receipts, newspaper reports, adverts… etc.
My hope is that the diary thus becomes closer to a form of automatic writing or involuntary literature. Yet it is also a personal record of my being in the world – of ‘life on earth’, in the here and now – with a particular interest in language, in the way the Subject is addressed and therefore positioned. The diary takes an almost psychotic approach to this language – one that doesn’t understand metaphor, but that instead takes everything at face value – as a sign from a world that ‘speaks’ only to me. Humour enters at this point.
My passage through the day (the time I bought my lunch, what I ate, where, and who served me, for example) is recorded, tracked, in receipts that accumulate chronologically. These, along with parking tickets, cashpoint slips and the many other printed records I unconsciously generate as I go about an average day, start to take on a voice of their own, start actually narrating my existence for me. “I” am reduced to the scribble on the dotted line, the scratched-out day on the parking permit or the name on an order of food.
My ‘self’ re-enters the space when I hold up certain ‘messages’ as serious suggestions – for example the flyer that comes through the door on a morning that I’m feeling particularly fed up with my husband. Yes, I would like someone to sort out my Bushy Garden as a matter of fact.
In relation to the concept of the show at Gallery 400 – the diary incorporates conversations, emails etc. from both Deirdre O’Dwyer, who selected me for the show, and Clive Hodgson, who was in turn selected by me, so it seemed appropriate to send it.
The framed works are two examples of the many found objects, the debris, collected during the year I kept the diary – 2011.