Speaking of ambivalent archiving, what does or does not pique interest when posting the occasional archival item on social media is entirely unpredictable and full of surprise, as is the case with this photograph.
paper cut out and escheveria, 2017
In this version, the trick can clearly be seen, the crude paper cut out balanced on the escheveria plant, the Instagram version looks more convincing. The charm, for myself at least, partly lies in the absence of a digital seamlessness and more in the toying of a clunky cutting, orienting, placement and scale. It would be perhaps an idea to do more.
The image was a playful moment, made in the wake of working with artist and book designer David Caines, who suggested working with professional and personal archival material through collage. During a visit to Helsinki in 2017, he scanned and printed items following discussions, which I cut out. He assembled some beautiful black and white ones for the book - which continue to be my favourite material in it. Following his visit, I came across this one, which was cut out from a photograph of my work Untitled (syncopations for more bodies) The succulent was a gift for my 50th birthday from the six students who formed the one and sadly only cohort for the pilot masters programme, Masters in ecology and contemporary performance (MAECP) at University of the Arts, Helsinki.
Whenever I see this image, I am reminded of work in the mid to late ‘90s by Eve Dent , at the time she worked with photography and performance and was inspired - if I remember correctly, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s proto-feminist novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, she created a wall paper print work in which she had embedded tiny figures of herself. I know it was a book that was very relevant to me at the time, as I explored and worked with the concept of the hysteric as a performative bodily strategy of resistance. I made performances, video works, drawings and animation exploring this idea of the hysteria as a proto-feminist figuration - and indeed one of ambiguity. Speaking of hysteria, this recent e-flux article, Hysteria as Scenography by Marie de Testa covers some of the references and thinking that was informing my thinking and works in the late ‘90s. Looking at the documentation now, there appears to be some of those preoccupations still at play in some of the performed contortions of Untitled (syncopations for more bodies)
albeit that was not the intention at the time, the work did fold into it’s metabolising processes, collaging of other references elements from cinema and performances which I will write about in another post.
Perhaps more cut outs, cut outs and collaged makings will emerge from this small fragment. The disparate act of recombining discreet elements continues to be a characteristic and ploy in my writing - and a preoccupation in how I approach visual works - with a nod to the works of a great many of the female surrealists. In the comments on the Instagram post artist Traci Kelly generously noting: It's great when you stumble across a previous work that reactivates thinking . . . ‘