Transference

       

ART ARCADIA: GAIL MAHON / ST. AUGUSTINE’S RESIDENCY /WK2 AUGUST 2018

After a week of welcomed solitude at St.Augustine’s, a decent sized graphite and paper piece came to the next phase of completion, intensive rubbing started well, quite fast paced but slowed a little with hand cramps and pressure sensitive knees as a few days went by with the increasing discomfort in the bones. This piece become a transfer of material and texture which also embossed the slight rise in the wooden floor boards- when the right time of day passed it caught new metallic flares in the light making the effort to finish less unending and show a slither of what it could look like with perserverence. There are folds in the sheet,  evident from the papers’ previous journey to an Italian Art Arcadia residency in La Mola, Pietrafitta, making this work more of a map that can been taken, lifted and read by the linear lines and topographic textures of the floor spaces where it has lay before and where it rests now.

Prior this residency, a conversation last year lead to fruition of new collaborative work ‘Untethered’ for -In Search if the Vernacular – which just opening this July at the Oriel Myrddn Gallery, Carmarthen. I was invited by Kim Norton, of London based artist group HAPTIC/TACIT, to collaborate and exchange thoughts upon temporary states, structures in materiality in architecture. Something which I connect to within my themes of cultural transference and material transformation lead to jointly producing a piece of work for the exhibition. Within our discussion exchanges the understanding of the vernacular followed out of these words:

There is something venerable about the nomad, moving across the surface of the planet with no need to take possession of it. For such peoples, architecture has a unique meaning. It’s often impermanent, collapsible and mobile, not a monument to colonization or a system or controlling space. In this sense architecture is not a ‘thing’ but a temporary state if being.”

A Nomad Amongst Builders, 1987, Michael Auping

I developed ceramic structures, layered with concentric compositional increases from porcelain white to umber red clay dug and processed in studio from Ballykelly forest next my home. A largescale latex piece taken from the wall of an abandoned RAC communications station above locally at Eglinton, and series of interaction images in studio helped visualize discussion drawn from reading sources and Kim’s material macquettes; the elements created between us became an assemblage of the notions over pause and place, movement and space. The tension held in opposing approaches in how we worked individually, now collaboratively, became the support mechanism that brought the structure together conceptually and visually. Performative interaction have become an increasinging exploration of my materiality embedded in the cultural structures in which i exist or create. Below are a few  images of  the interactions produced as the research score between Kim and myself whilst developing the work for exhibition.

               

The work at this residency at St. Augustine’s continues to parallel the vernacular of layered materiality; as I resist pinning down my own creative practice, I am circling peripheries situated somewhere in between my research reading and everyday life. These artworks now act as a conduit to help consider unanswered questions, hidden systems and intangible connections which are not coherent in language but can be understood as intensities in energy that are always shifting in and out of my attention. In considering ‘the body as material culture’, architecture in this sense ‘of being’; St. Augustine’s floor was an open invitation to dwell upon grounding, a momentary stillness to make some technical advances in upscaling the latex castings of previous work and physically pin my focus to the floor with each layer applied.

Working with latex is satisfying with  its innate flexibility- a liquid transfer to solid as it casts a record of a place or temporary state in its dermis layer of architectural skin- which can be folded, lifted and carried. Even with the next exhibition its taking with it an accumulation of time and place and developing an additional layer of context with every move becoming adapted by space which it inhabits, a nomadic membrane with its own lifespan and memory never settled or to return home.

@gailfm