‘Everything Is Connected’, Alice Anderson
HS Projects presented ‘Everything Is Connected’, an exhibition of Alice Anderson’s recent sculptural works made after performances.
Alice Anderson’s practice is an exploration of memory in the digital world, she ‘records’ objects with copper thread through her sculptures and performances. For the last ten years, Anderson has explored the physical and physiological mutations that transform our world. The artist has her own way of memorising objects and architecture through movement, contrasting the ‘outsourcing’ of memory by digital processes.
Anderson transforms virtual data into tactile forms to re-create a new physical relationship with objects and spaces through ritual performances. It is an act of ‘memorising’ and a means of understanding the world around her, keeping hold of the physicality of objects, as more and more of our life becomes subsumed by digital technology. As the artist says, ‘I always worry to break or lose an object, therefore I have established rules: when one of the objects around me is likely to become obsolete or is lost in the stream of our lives, I ‘memorise’ it with thread before it happens.’
It is Anderson’s own method of ‘memorising’ objects and architectural elements in 3D. ‘Lift’, 2015, ‘Ladders’, 2014 and ‘Door Frame’, 2011 have all gone through this process of entwining an object, mummifying it, recording it for posterity. By measuring an object, obtaining its data and ‘marking’ it into copper wire, Anderson presents us with a ‘recorded’ lift, a ‘recorded’ door frame and ‘recorded’ fire ladders.
Anderson appears to record ‘the physical and material world’ whilst digitisation takes over. ‘I started ‘recording’ objects and architecture in 2010. I believe that this action is one of the instinctive consequences of memory going digital. There isn’t any nostalgia in this approach. It is simply a physical interaction with the present: the digital world gives more freedom, information and creativity, but how are we meant to cope with it? This revolution is just beginning and it’s already affecting the whole of society and all its current models – economic, social and ideological. Our everyday life already sources a lot of its basic reflexes from automated information or service-sharing, through Google, Wikipedia, Uber and so on, so I have to find my own methods of slowing down, of keeping a sort of intimacy with the world surrounding me, of understanding, learning and memorising differently. It’s a paradox, but the more my everyday existence fills up with digital data about the things around me, the greater my need to get to grips with their material, physical data’.
Those actions typically combine primitive and modern, strong and vulnerable, one-off chance and ritual repetition. We might call the result Post-Digital. Certainly it is informed – indeed, troubled – by knowledge of the digital alternative, and goes beyond it to seek new haptic relationships between people and the physical world. Anderson’s post-digital rituals give us a directness of engagement, which a photo in a file cannot. Yet her practice might also be seen, taken as a whole, to be mourning the loss of the pre-digital world, to yearn for the times when rituals were charged with maximum power and objects were restricted to their original selves.
‘Everything Is Connected’ was at Howick Place from May 2013 – March 2014.
‘Tilted’ , Tania Kovats
HS Projects presented a group of works by acclaimed British artist Tania Kovats. Kovats is renowned for producing sculptures, large scale installations and temporal works which explore our experience and understanding of landscape, and finds in the natural world both her subject and material. She approaches the natural environment both in terms of identifiable places – sites that can be mapped, named, inhabited and scrutinised – and as matter with properties that can be subjected to external forces and potential transformations.
Kovats’ barnacle-encrusted ‘Colony’, 2009 developed from her 2009 residency in the Galapagos Islands. Fascinated by barnacles as creatures that dwell – both literally and figuratively – in the spaces between sea and land, rock and animal, and liquid and solid, the artist also discovered, within their capacity to self-generate and form colonies, a metaphor for the rapid social, urban, and ecological developments occurring on Galapagos.
Kovats’ ‘Tilted’, 2002 exposes the artist’s keen interest in the rugged drama of coastal landscapes. Contained within the exposed rock cliff faces, are turbulent geological forces, which cut a stark line between light and dark, interior and exterior. By embedding the cliff within the architecture of a modernist plinth, Kovats uses an element of the landscape to attack the solidity of the white cube, subjecting it to the forces by which it was created. This ‘tilted’ cliff, as a boundary between land and sea, alludes to Kovats’ interest in oceans, a topic that comes to preoccupy much of her later work.
In her series of ‘Schist’, 2001 sculptures, Kovats’ use of wax, a material that is both responsive and malleable, allows for works that ooze and sweat, stretching in ways that result in physical abnormalities. Exhibited at a height at which they can be closely studied, Kovats encourages the eye to follow the layers of wax as they ripple and undulate, as well as the flakes of glitter which intersperse the coloured folds. On viewing these metamorphic sculptures, one becomes aware of Kovats’ exploration of both the artificial and the organic. To make these works, Kovats used ‘Mountain’, 2001, the design of which she based on a machine invented around 1900. Kovats poured colours of molten wax into the machine, allowing it to cool and set into sedimentary layers. She subsequently placed lead shot on top of the strata to act like a gravitational force to contain the layers, so that when she turned the mechanism’s handle, the piston, moving forward with a force like a tectonic plate, compressed the wax into hulking folds and ripples.
‘Tilted’ was at 5 Howick Place from March to October 2015.
‘Open Books’, Paula Roush
Working within the framework of CoolTan Art’s support for therapeutic art workshops, Paula Roush established a collective under ‘Open Books’ as a participatory photo book project. ‘Open Books’ explored the narrative development of how a photographic collection can be viewed and interpreted through the different media of hand made editions, printed editions, and public exhibition. The photo book project was developed to address a sense of time and place through the incorporation and display of images, consisting of home, personal identity, memory and a sense of history.
The participants worked with a mix of found, sourced and individual photographs with the outcomes incorporated into a collective exhibition of photo books.
The photo book is an ideal medium by which to express one’s individuality and also enter into a dialogue with others. The visual juxtaposition of newly made images with personal memorabilia enabled the participants to develop personal narratives with both an artistic and therapeutic value through the exploration of memory, autobiography and cultural identity.
The process of creating the photo book project encompassed a variety of skills, from image making and composition, to the study of personal archives and family albums, the selection and editing of the material, including writing and drawing, and the physical construction of handmade book proofs that included sewing and other craft-related skills.
The final outputs of the photo book project included the creation of artist newspapers and a case bound book. For the exhibition, loose pages from all the publications were stitched and mounted into frames to evoke the physicality of the publications. The process of decision-making and selection was part of the working process resulting in both the personal/private books and a collective public exhibition of both books and prints on the wall.
‘Open Books’ was commissioned by HS Projects and funded by the Insight Community Arts Programme (2002 – 2015).
The project ran from January to June 2013.