Land of 9711
August – September 2015
Land of 9711
2015
Installation
Nylon Net, Nylon String, Wood, Projector, Video Camera
Blue Studio, University for the Creative Arts (UCA), United Kingdom
Work named Device by Daniel Tollady was visited and parked in the Land of 9711
photo by UCA Lorna, Greenfish Photography
photo by UCA Lorna, Greenfish Photography
photo by UCA Lorna, Greenfish Photography
There is the notion of presence, aura, dangling, form, colour and texture, it works relationship with space and time. The installations look like my earlier line drawing, but expanding from two dimensional to three dimensional, there are more tangible now, it is touchable and gravity’s pull energy is shown. This work is a combination of pieces, it has been expanding to a larger scale. Each piece of cloth drapes as different weave and different individual. It is all about combination, the colour, the structure, the sound, the live view, all individual element has it own association and being combine together to create a state of flux. Our world is just like this to create harmony, don’t we?
Colour, from white to florescent pink to hibiscus orange, reminds me the contrast where the first sunlight shines on the snow-capped peaks of Mount Aspiring/Tititea. The colour is individual also as good mixture. When you crossing space to the left corner, the colour combination is cooling down, it is shade of green and contrasting yellow to white. Switch off the fluorescent light in this white cube, let the spot light comes from the top; the whole environment again creates the mysterious and dramatic.
What happens when this space stands alone by itself? It is an abundant space or a space of silence? However, when people come across this space, it turns to be lively liquidity space. If it has to be looked as the lyrical and theatrical set up, I rather it is for the play of Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, all audiences will become the performers, fairies dancing in the forest with a magic wand while there is another live magic mirror on the wall to see the beautiful movement of the interaction within human, art installation and space, they are all one piece of art.
The smaller wall hanging pieces show the peculiarity of the material, the net is formed by millions of hexagons. It is fragile but it is foldable and able to construct form. With combination of white painted wood blocks, they look more structured, secure and balance. They are each combinations of two to four colours, just like the mixes of colours on the palette. They look tender and fresh.
‘I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror.’ (Foucault, 1986:24)
For the live view, let’s imagine if you can see a screen on the wall that reflecting your surrounding, thing, you and others simultaneously. Will you firstly notice yourself before noticing the others? If the answer is yes, it may not mean you are narcissistic, that is what we call a natural reflex because you are the closest person to yourself. Everyone will take notice of how he/she looks like on the screen.
Another example is, whenever I show you a group photo of your friends with you, most probably you will look for yourself first(?) in the photo and check whether you look good in the photo before passing the photo to the next person. You definitely will feel relief when you looked good in the photo or if it does not differs too much from your real life.
This shows the same usage of mirror in our daily life. Every morning, when you stand in front of the mirror, you will clean up and groom yourself to make sure you are presentable before going out from the house. Not only that, you will also tend to stand straight to maintain your healthy body posture. Because that is the way you want yourself to be portrayed by different way; the decent, calm, active, confident, playful or curious of yourself?
This installation can stand individually, but when the viewer engages with it, it will become another entity. Besides that, the live view is important to be recorded, of those unexpected movement and rhythm had been created lively by everyone who passed by the “mirror on the wall”.
This space includes still and lives objects, pale and vibrant, soft and hard, high and low, geometric and organic, pause and play, silent and noise, slow and fast, ambiguous and abstractive. This piece of art is completed by combination of all of them.
When you travel around within this land, you may find (surprise) in between.
Bibiography
Foucault, Michel (1986) ‘Of Other Spaces’ In: Diacritics 16 (1) pp.22-27 Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Special Thanks to Terry Perk and Judith Rugg
