The Whispering Gallery: Cinematic Meditations on Transnationalism 1977-2013
Léa Donnan
A thesis submitted to the University of New South Wales in fulfilment of the requirement for Masters of Fine Art (Research)
School of Art, College of Fine Arts The University of New South Wales
Australia
2013
1 ORIGINALITY STATEMENT
‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’
Signed ……………………………………………...... !! Date …………16 / 08 / 2013…………………
2 ABSTRACT:
Using decaying systems wrought from the shifting tides of globalism, Léa Donnan creates cinematic elegies that question, remix and remake communal material histories as part of a wider cultural narrative. Both seductive and terrifying, Donnan retraces the movements of whales, ships and planes in relation to her personal history, a process which suggests how entangled in a multi-system global fabric we truly are. Through a series of actions and appropriations, Donnan interprets world wide systems of migration, communication and exchange as a gestural study; lace like markings on the surface of the planet.
3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my sincere thanks to my supervisor John Gillies.
I'd like to acknowledge Sarah Hamilton for her superior editing skills and keen patience.
My heartfelt thanks to Melody Woodnut, NES Artist Residency, dear friends and community members of Skagaströnd, Iceland.
With great appreciation to Emma Sanderson, Jieva Grigelionyte, Jurga Latvyte and Dainius Bendikas in Reykjavik, Iceland.
A warm thank you to the staff and administration of the College of Fine Arts, University New South Wales, with special appreciation to Bonita Ely, Martin Sims and Jo Elliot.
4 TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction...... 7 Chapter One
WINGS: Physiology of an Artist...... 9
Chapter Two
BRAIN: The Central Nervous System and the Stitch...... 17
Chapter Three
SPINE: Gesture and Inhabitation...... 22
Chapter Four
LUNGS: Expansion and Collapse, Cinematic works...... 27
Chapter Five
CAPILLARIES: A Network View of the World...... 33
BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 36
APPENDIX, additional works...... 40
5 INTRODUCTION
“Then I understood it all. In order to make myself heard, I too must speak as it were along the side of the gallery, which would carry the sound of my voice just as the wire carries the electric fluid from point to point...... If my companions were only to remove a few feet from where they stood, the acoustic effect would be over, my Whispering Gallery would be destroyed...... ”
- Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth (The Rescue in the Whispering Gallery, chapter 25)
All the transport and communication systems in the world become one surface. They are lifted, lace like, to create a single object, a single piece of crafted network fabric. This multi- system material forms the conceptual underbelly of my enquiry. Weaving with the strands of decaying systems entangled in the shifting tides of globalism, I am attempting cinematic elegies that suggest a prototype craft of folkloric global proportions. Working in interdisciplinary practices and drawing on a range of experience both personal and multicultural, I have been engaged in detailed research referencing wider fields of activity in science, technological theory and folk discourse. Exploring the above mentioned areas with abstract representation in film, video, sculpture and performance in the context of installation, I am cataloguing and remixing the communal history of materials as part of a wider cultural narrative.
My field work took place primarily in Iceland due to its key location below the arctic circle, on the mid atlantic ridge where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates meet. Iceland is a hub for migration, transport and industry in proximity to international shipping lanes also strategic for British and American air and naval bases during WWII.
My core interest is seeking to understand human nature through migratory systems, network theory, and poetics. Weaving with international networks, using mark making actions
6 and appropriations of disused systems via the moving image, my research aims to refine an intimate visual vocabulary belonging to a third culture; part of the human experience of globalization and transnationalism. My own third culture identity as a practitioner is important as it hangs in the balance of a fragile web of systems of exchange sustained by world economy and transatlantic flight. I am a member of an international nomadic generation raised in the cultural and economic boom times of eighties and nineties globalization, now witness to world economic expansion and collapse. As an artist and mark maker, without ever belonging, I am simultaneously dispossessed and rooted in a cosmopolitan life.
By establishing a practice of weaving with international networks through mark making and appropriation, I aim to investigate my part as a specimen of a global phenomenon. My family heritage exists at a cultural interstice with largely Western influence. The typical “border- spanning behavior” practiced by families like mine engages “some important questions about the meaning of national belonging and citizenship in a globalizing transnational era”.1 Moving under the currents of transnational economy, one might say we were members of the mobile elite, although definitions such as “ ‘transmigrant’ or ‘transilience’, that were once applied to mobile elites, but are now just as relevant to a wide range of people who have had the capacity to move and live in and between different countries.” 2
1 Ley, D. (2009) Interna onal Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Oxford: Elsevier. Pages 388-393
2 Papastergiadis, N. (2012) Cosmopolitanism and Culture. p 46 quo ng Richmond, A. (2002) Globaliza on: Implica ons for Immigrants and Refugees. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25(5), p712
7 Chapter 1 WINGS: PHYSIOLOGY OF AN ARTIST
At one time in my life, my mother had an Austrian passport, my father Irish and my brother Canadian. I was born in France and was issued an Australian passport, a country I only moved to at the age of seventeen. Positioned within a pattern of international locations and flight paths, relying on communication networks to maintain continually shifting familial connections; I was born a physical player in the systems supporting transnationalism. There is no natural order in the tides of global culture with so many forces at play and ”today there is no singular set of co-ordinates that is pulling the major flows. People are on the move in multiple and circular directions,” 3 making it all the more necessary to mark this moment in international chaos. My enquiries as an artist are an attempt to form some kind of social order in this tangle of international exchange. I have become my own specimen under the umbrella of globalization.
As a member of an internationally mobile family unit, being repeatedly displaced by either opportunity or historic event is an imprint of my heritage. I believe it governs my pulse. I am an extreme example of what Ruth Hill Useem, an American sociologist and anthropologist named a “third culture kid” (or a 3CK)4. I am a third generation specimen of the families who formed the cultural underpinnings of globalism by raising children in cultures other than their own. My mother was born in Japan and married my Australian father in America. We lived in England, France, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, the United States and later on, Australia.
My international background forms the skeletal frame of my art practice. By cataloguing and remixing global systems into lines and fibers, I’m suggesting a prototype cultural practice and a folkloric language for a third culture. “Third culture” was coined by Ruth Hill Useem in collaboration with Dr. John Useem, “as a generic term to cover the styles of life created, shared,
3 Papastergiadis, N. (2012) Cosmopolitanism and Culture. p 46 quo ng Richmond, A. (2002) Globaliza on: Implica ons for Immigrants and Refugees. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25(5), p712
4 Useem, R Hill. (1975) Studies of Third Cultures. East Lansing: Ins tute for Interna onal Studies in Educa on, Michigan State University.
8 and learned by persons who are in the process of relating their societies, or sections thereof, to each other.” 5 Useem has written on the cultural adjustments of biracial children on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation of South Dakota, about British/American educated Indians in the state of Bombay, India and between 1952 and 1986 conducted fieldwork in expatriate communities, international schools and with third culture children in Asia, Africa, The Middle East, The United States and Europe. Third culture kids or TCKs develop unique traits and by definition live outside their passport countries and all over the world due to their parents’ work6 (such as transnational business, educational, religious, millitary or non profit institutions). I am particularly interested in Useem’s description of TCKs as her research spans from the forties well into the current age of globalization, the period I describe in relation to how my personal heritage informs my work.
The term “third culture” defines the sub-social order and relational experience of living at the interstice of different cultures7. The first culture, the “home” culture, originates from the parents of the child. The second and “host” culture is the one outside the geography of parental origin. The third culture is the connective tissue, the mobile territory between those two places.8 This interstitial space for me invites gesture.
My first culture is hybrid. My Austrian mother was born in Japan and my father in Australia. To demonstrate the influence of my blurred cultural heritage on my work, I have used my mother as the parent most influenced by migrant trends in world history. Brigitte Elisabeth Kinast was born to Austrian parents in Yokohama, Japan in 1943. My grandfather, Heinrich Kinast born of German/Austrian parents, was an engineer working for a Japanese corporation. His services
5 Useem, R Hill. (Jan. 1993) “Third Culture Kids Focus of a Major Study” Newslinks. The Newspaper of Interna onal Schools Services; Vol. XII, No. 3; Princeton, NJ.
6 Pollock, D. and Van Reken, R. (2001) Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds. Boston/London: Nicholas Brealy Publishing. p 13
7 “ third culture is not synonymous with Third World nor with C.P. Snow's Third Culture. However, all are related in that these were early a empts to make summaries of what was happening in the world at the me of a major shi in the rela onships among the peoples of the globe in the middle of the twen eth century.” Useem, R. Hill. Newslinks-- the newspaper of Interna onal Schools Services; January, 1993; Vol. XII, No. 3; Princeton, NJ.
8 Pollock, D. and Van Reken, R. (2001) Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds. Boston/London: Nicholas Brealy Publishing. p 14
9 were part of a transaction included in the sale of a patent by a German company detailing the extraction of sugar and alcohol from wood. My grandfather was in this sense, a commodity.9 During this contract working for the Tokyo-based company the Kinasts first lived in the desolate fields of North Korea where the first factory was built10. They lived in an old barracks, cooking outside, wrapped in fur and felt to keep warm. To get meat, because Heinrich was a terrible shot, my Grandmother (the daughter of an Austrian customs inspector) would smuggle packages tied onto the bumpers of trains on return trips from Mukden where there was a European butcher. They eventually moved to Japan after the outbreak of the European war, before the Japanese entered the conflict. In 1945 the American occupying troops had arrived and Heinrich was put under house arrest, as through the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, my mother’s family had become non-Japanese enemies of the Americans: German by political default. Both my mother and her brother were born to Austrian parents after the annexation and were issued birth certificates with swastikas. The great irony of this was that my grandfather, always an apolitical person, had been working in Munich during the rise of Nazism and jumped at the opportunity to leave for the Far East to escape the fanaticism of the Brown Shirts.
In 1947, when my mother was four years old, she was deported with her family on the Marine Jumper, an American troop transporter. They traveled the Suez Canal, passed the Rock of Gibraltar and arrived in Bremerhaven, Germany, where the Kinasts were treated as displaced persons. They were stationed at an internment camp next to a Russian prisoner of war camp in Ludwigshafen before being returned to Austria in freight carriages three months later. After years of living in cramped apartments in the bombed out city of Salzburg, when the American Major had left my great grandparents’ home and it was returned to them, my grandmother bought a subscription to the opera and the theatre. It became a monthly ritual for mother and daughter to attend, a return to a civilized life. I believe my mother’s experience of loss and hardship was buoyed by repeated exposure to high art while her family’s life was rebuilt. Wherever we were, my mother offered me, as a continuation of her own monthly visits to the opera, an experience of
9 Henrich’s involvement in the plant extrac ng alcohol from wood became a point of conten on for the Americans (in addi on to his default German status) as the Japanese government was interested in his plant to make fuel for the military.
10 To obtain prenatal care and give birth to her son in 1939, my grandmother, Paula traveled to Kobe, Japan.
10 the arts in many forms. This experience with aesthetics became my solution for change and I developed a visceral and deeply personal language with art. This learned trait was the one of the greatest privileges of my upbringing. My mother brought the fundamentalist sculptures along desert highways in Jeddah alive for me. The elegant water towers and beautiful terminals to shelter pilgrims to Mecca became animated in their own right. Cathedrals, public parks, cemeteries, temples, historic houses, museums and galleries crisscrossing continents provided me with a sensation of belonging. I remember with fine detail the stone surfaces of not only my grandfather’s grave in Salzburg (which my grandmother took me to religiously) but also the unicorns at the Mirabell Garden gates and the collection of twenty terribly politically incorrect moss covered dwarves. Some time in the early nineties Louise Bourgeois made my stomach churn. I was an awkward teenager struck down by Bill Viola’s video installation The Passing as if it prophesied everything that could be important in the world. Later on, the only time I ever skipped school I went to the Louvre.
My father was a second generation Australian, born of Italian and Irish ancestry. His father worked for the railroad. My paternal great grandfather was a Sicilian, captain of The Hawk, a transport vessel which traveled the Hawkesbury river in New South Wales. He had met his Irish wife in County Tipperary from where they had migrated to Australia and had eight children. My parents met by chance at the American Express office in Salzburg where my father, a young man traveling through Europe on his way to Paris, picked up his mail (as was common practice at the time). Anthony Donnan became a flea market eccentric, an avid collector, amateur pilot and scuba diving enthusiast. He filled me with a fascination for objects. We shared the thrill of the junk store pursuit and an adoration of the lost, found and once cherished parts of people’s lives which we deemed worthy for another time around. His enthusiasm for rehabilitating junk cars, parts of ships and gadgets became as instrumental in my life as the cultural education my mother provided. The smell of old cars and diesel, those imagined stories of lost and found parts filled the spaces of my cultural identity. While I was growing up, my fluency with the language of forgotten things was more valuable to me than pop music, magazines or chewing gum.
My life developed in marked contrast to the women in some of the countries I have lived in. Mine was a position of privilege, although not of the Kardashian kind. It’s easy to romanticize
11 the conditions of my upbringing, it was not as glamorous as one might imagine although certainly exotic. My cultural identity is my wild card, a strange cultural bewilderment that came under the corporate shield of my father’s work with an American multinational company. Our family moved in the pattern of transmigrants, as custodians supporting the economic infrastructures of organizations more privileged and more powerful than individuals.
I existed in an international grey area, staying for periods of nine months to three and half years, usually attending international schools with a strong American influence. My education was disjointed due to all the relocations, although I studied consistently with kids from all over the world. I imagined a borderless planet with varying customs although at some point realized girls my age lived in the face of great adversity, subject to injustices I would never experience or understand. I was shocked as an adult when I realized female genital mutilation was occurring in some parts of Saudi Arabia while I stood on that same soil. My mother was forbidden to drive, work or own property like all women in the country. In public we covered up but only my mother wore the black, cloak-like abaya. The imported western magazines had all the limbs and necks of women violently blacked out with permanent marker. These were the media images of women available to me. In a country where you can lose a hand as a punishment for stealing, a classmate’s Cabbage Patch doll getting beheaded at a standard airport customs check had a different weight to it. It was just normal to us although we always had to be careful. Looking back now, those experiences were surreal but had very serious real life implications that were just part of respecting the cultural parameters of living in someone else’s country. I remember someone trying to sell contraband Jesus pictures out of a long coat at the Souq11. Despite my awareness of the social/religious tension over my body and potential Christianity at eight years old, my memories of Jeddah are curiously free, concentrated in the expanse of desert, the saltiness of the Red Sea and the beautiful prayer call marking dawn and dusk. It was an abrupt spatial change having just left suburban London. Jeddah marked my awareness of scale with its long expanses of highways through open desert and thousands of lampposts with no villages in sight. At roundabouts the black marble fist of Allah coming out of the sand to pound the air on
11 Arabian market/commercial quarter.
12 the way to Dad’s office, a tower of compacted cars, an enormous globe that lit up at night. It remains the place that has influenced my visual memory the most.
Moving between English suburbs, regions in the Mediterranean, Arabian deserts and Asian cities, shifting terrain and navigating the rules of different societies, I developed an awareness of cultural codes of behavior.12 Ruth Hill Useem witnessed these implications in her own children when living as a researcher in India in the fifties. Useem noted that “many such children took on behavioral norms, modes of communication, and other cultural points of reference from each of the countries they lived in.” 13 These kids inhabited new environments with a highly developed sense of adaptation. I too was forced to become a specialist14 of this kind of chameleon-like behavior. During high school at an American/International School in Paris I became a boarder in a series of four different French families. I was “farmed out” due to my family’s circumstances at the time. I had to be highly flexible within the intimate architectures of different familial homes. In addition to being a perpetual outsider I was also switching between French culture and the American/international territory of my daily education. I overcame the isolation from my own family and vacillated between being a fly on the wall, walking on eggshells, or generally stumbling through other people’s lives. It was during this time that I became an observer and developed a heightened sensitivity or intuition to mood which I believe plays out in my work. I also began to dream again in French. I became highly independent. When I was younger I sometimes spent summers with other people’s families or away at camp and was often put on planes alone with my documents slung around my neck like a bell. Border crossing became akin to a pedestrian walk way. French was my first language, now I sound American but I used to
12 I learned to nego ate the nonsensical amalgams; don’t be the loud American in France; never show the soles of your feet in Jeddah; never eat with your le hand in Indonesia; cover your arms in an Italian church; don’t say damn in front of your English classroom etc.
13 Publicover, B. “Globetro ng Kids Create Social Phenomenon,” China Daily, North American ed. [New York, N.Y] 11 Feb 2006.
14 ”What nature needed man to be was adap ve in many if not any direc on; wherefore she gave man a mind as well as a coordina ng switchboard brain. Mind apprehends and comprehends the general principles governing flight and deep sea diving, and man puts on his wings or his lungs, then takes them off when not using them. The specialist bird is greatly impeded by its wings when trying to walk. The fish cannot come out of the sea and walk upon land, for birds and fish are specialists” Fuller, B. (1969) Opera ng Manual for Spaceship Earth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. p3
13 sound British. I’m told by my parents people used to wonder who I belonged to during my British phase, especially when, as a small child, I went through a phase of looking mysteriously asian. At home in my passport country (Australia) I’m always asked where I’m visiting from and people find it difficult to pronounce my name.
In some instances my cultural exposure was rich, in others I was isolated and naive. It was tricky to relate to the lives of my peers outside the international experience. Attending public school in the United States during the third grade, I was an oddity, outrageous to my best friend who had never left the country. For me she had her own exoticism. It was completely wild for me to learn that we could make actual contact with a radio station to make a request that they would actually play. I was envious of my best friend’s life growing up in the same house, the same town, the same school. She was by some respects an outsider, too, and because of this we’ve maintained a life-long friendship which, given the nature of third culture kids, can be extremely rare. Pico Iyer beautifully describes the sensations of growing up not quite belonging.
“More and more of us may find ourselves in the emotional or metaphysical equivalent of that state we know from railway stations, when we’re sitting in a carriage waiting to pull out and can’t tell, often, whether we’re moving forwards, or the train next to ours is pulling back”15
Like Iyer’s description of the train carriage, never quite coming and not quite going, a strange stasis exists inside you when you grow up on the move. Feeling at peace when in motion yet continually and intangibly restless, I am particularly at home in airports, not quite being able to explain where "home" is. I’m haunted.16
15 Iyer, Pico. (2000) The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home. New York: Vintage.
16 “From Taipei and Paris to Los Angeles and Seoul, ci zens of such agglomera ng global-ci es (becoming ‘fellow in-betweeners’ [Iyer, 2000, 19] of rootless places), become disoriented, restless, haunted by the uncanniness (‘un- homeliness’) of a world driven by the dynamism of neo-liberal values, uproo ng local iden ty and es of loca on, yet driven by errup ons of spirit presences and place-haun ngs that techno-science cannot abolish nor calibrate” Wilson, Rob. (2003) Globaliza on, Broken Aesthe cs and the Global Soul, p.36. retrieved June 1, 2013 h p:// www2.ucsc.edu/aparc/Rob%20Wilson%20for%20APARC/US=Korea=wilson%5B1%5D.pdf_1.pdf
14 Chapter 2 BRAIN: THE CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM AND THE STICH
There was a period in history where doctors believed the condition known as “nostalgia,” which we now describe as homesickness, existed only in Swiss mercenaries. Johannes Hofer, in 1688, invented the word nostalgia: integrating the Greek word nostos, "return to the native land," with algos, the word for pain. He used this word to describe a new disease that affected young people far from home. Its symptoms included "continued sadness, meditation only of the Fatherland, disturbed sleep . . . decrease of strength, hunger, thirst . . . cares or even palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, . . . stupidity of the mind—attending to nothing hardly, other than an idea of the Fatherland."17 The best remedy was to return sufferers home, for nostalgia could prove fatal.
The symptoms Hofer describes compare to how one might imagine the sufferings of a pilgrim on a long journey or a migrant enduring treacherous terrain in search of a better life. Joan Didion, the American author/journalist explores themes of social disjunction and rootlessness, always interpreted from a highly personal viewpoint and a specific Western ideological perspective.18 Her 2003 collection of essays Where I Was From describes the relics and smallest details of her personal history against the expansive landscape of the American frontier.
“In another room of this house I had on the Pacific Ocean there hung a quilt from another crossing, a quilt made by my great-great-grandmother Elisabeth Anthony Reese on a wagon journey during which she buried one child, gave birth to another, twice contracted mountain fever, and took turns
17 Ma , S. (Sept. 2007) You Can’t Go Home Again: Homesickness and Nostalgia in U.S. History. Bloomington: The Journal of American History. Vol 94, No.2. / Hofer, J. (Aug. 1934) Medical Disserta on on Nostalgia. trans. Anspach, C. Bulle n of the Ins tute of the History of Medicine, 2. p376-91
18 Scatamacchia, C. (2004-2005) Horizontal and Ver cal Themes in Joan Didion's Memoir Where I Was From. American Studies Associa on of Italy. p 69
15 driving a yoke of oxen, a span of mules and twenty-two head of loose stock. In this quilt of Elizabeth Reese’s were more stitches than I had ever seen in a quilt, a blinding and pointless compaction of stitches, and it occurred to me as I hung it that she must have finished it one day in the middle of the crossing, somewhere in the wilderness of her own grief and illness, and just kept on stitching.”19
These stitches are a visceral account of the palpitations of Elisabeth Anthony Reese. Archived by gesture, knuckles on needle and cloth, the embroidery floss is embedded with the psychic weight of her journey.20 Didion’s descriptions of the objects once belonging to her ancestors tell the story of the American pioneer women whose lines of passage across the continent have become relics themselves.
Didion knew rootlessness as a child; her father having been in the WWII Army Corps, the family moved continually. “It made me feel perpetually like an outsider.” 21 Her fragments of embroidery and quilts represent the collective trajectories of the wagon train journeys that become a historical network in which she can locate herself. Through her writing she amplifies the stitches of these small relics to measure her own distance from who she might be against the massive American landscape.
19 Didion, J. (2003) Where I Was From. New York, New York: Knopf.
20 “Folk Art was made in and for the communi es that used it. Like vernacular speech, it was some mes whimsical, but never inflated. Concise and prac cal, it was full of the marks of real social life-clues to hopes, values and aspira ons that you feel you can read with trust because they have not been given rhetorical form. Hughes, R. (1997) American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. New York: Knopf. p. 42.
21 Didion, J. (June. 3, 2006)”Telling Stories In Order to Live” Joan Didion Interview. Los Angeles, California: Na onal Book Award. retrieved June 10, 2013 h p://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/did0int-1
16 Determined by the demands of a global economy, my own early crossings were chance passages, a matter in which I had little choice. By crafting a specialized cinematic architecture for the benefit of my own spatial understanding, I’m creating a multidimensional fabric of enquiry.22 Examining these threads, lines and fissures as simplifications of wider spaces, I’m interested in juxtaposing the tiny gestures of embroidery against the wide expanse of terrestrial space. Broken into lines between point A and point B, I imagine giant stitches across the earth like the infamous U2 Cold War spy plane laying down photographic surveillances ‘stitches’ across the Soviet Union. I can sum up my experience as a series of captures defined by a line of direction. I’m intimate with the lines of communication and transport surrounding my identity; they are my family heirloom, sometimes lace, sometimes flat weave, always forming an amorphous system of exchange.
The foundational base of textiles begins with threads, cords or bonds organized into a system. Techniques of handling fiber in crochet, tapestry and weaving are perfect algorithms designed to create interfaces from a selection of material and color. Thread is created by the twisting of fiber to increase strength and elasticity for braiding, pleating and weaving. The configuration of many threads is organized to make a stronger whole.23 Many disparate parts create a single line of cord. My cinematographic choices follow a continuous line, a woven expansion. The Whispering Gallery, One Ton Drag, Vitrine and North - South are new works that represent a catalogue of materials bound together to create a line of enquiry through material study. Collecting threads of migrational paths, paths of abandoned planes, fragmenting lines of communication, my films bind appropriated materials into a new material interface. I want my viewer to ‘feel’ the pigment on the screen. The attempt is to weave with world wide systems while mountains of discarded net, giant filters of the sea, create an articulated fiber sculpture.
22 “For me the defini on of cra is that it is an individual form of produc on as opposed to mass produc on, and also that a cra ed item usually be made by the same person who would wind up using it” Zi el, A. h p:// www.supernaturale.com/ar cles.html?id=149, Retrieved June 15, 2013.
23 Worden, Alexander. (2011) Emergent Explora ons: Analog and Digital Scrip ng. Blacksburg, Virginia : Virginia Polytechnic Ins tute and State University. p 12
17 Janine Antonini describes her work “braided rope; Moor, 2001” 24 as being “made out of materials from my friends, I thought I could make a rope from materials of my life and walk it like a lifeline.” 25 Through the act of binding these materials into the narrative of her own object, Antonini is able to both appropriate, reanimate and repurpose them for her own questioning. Invested in process through a ritual of collecting and performance, she left her familial home in the Bahamas for boarding school at the age of 13. Antonini’s work “Touch” [a video produced in the Bahamas in 2002] is one of the few pieces that directly addresses my relationship to both the landscape and my childhood home.” I’m interested in the gesture that Antonini performs against her own familiar space. “The video was filmed on the seashore in front of that home on the island of Grand Bahama.” She draws a line in cinematic space and real time video. “In it, I walk back and forth across a wire that is parallel to but slightly above the horizon. As I walk, the wire dips to touch the horizon. I balance there for a brief moment.”
Although my own childhood home is impossible to describe with one name or one landscape, it could be interpreted as a thread that binds a cord from the intersection of a series of systems. Should these systems negotiate architecture, land, water and vehicles, their amalgam might form a plane (or line) of familiarity not dissimilar to Antonini’s ocean backdrop. Making works that inhabit systems and spaces greater than the place I can physically occupy gives me that brief moment of balance Antonini describes. I can see own my position in relation to the space I’ve created at that moment of enquiry. What is my location within the global networks that I can locate? What fibers and systems can I appropriate to weave my own third culture?
Joan Didion’s quilt hangs in safe keeping and with the knowledge of it’s origins remains an object of great significance - a relic of the infrastructure of Didion’s belonging and personal geography. Elisabeth Anthony Reese’ stitches would lose their meaning should the quilt stray from the context of Didion’s family. The vastness of the American landscape Reese crossed in
24 Antonini, J. (2001) “Moor”. retrieved July 10, 2013 h p://www.pbs.org/art21/images/janine-antoni/moor- detail-2001
25 Antonini, J. “Touch” and “Moor”. Interview, Art 21. retrieved July 10, 2013 h p://www.art21.org/texts/janine- antoni/interview-janine-antoni-touch-and-moor,
18 search of better fortune would be lost to anonymity26, the scale of the tiny threads disproportionate to their tremendous value. Through the appropriation of the threads of familiar global systems I attempt to create my own temporal family heirloom; like Didion’s family history of crossings they provide a reflection of one’s self. My actions become a binding mechanism, a document of family heritage in relation to crossing, motion, space.
26 “The idea of the”anonymous” folk ar st, like the Noble Savage, is a figment of the sophis cated. One sees why as soon as one asks, ‘Anonymous to whom?’ Things become ‘anonymous’ when they leave home and dri into the market, because they lose their domes c history and cease to be triggers of memory”. Hughes, R. (1997) American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. New York: Knopf. p 42
19 Chapter 3 SPINE: GESTURE AND INHABITATION
After investigating scale through mark-making actions in art, craft, and literature, I arrive at the use of lines and gesture to negotiate my own investigations in transnational territory. The systems that support global culture can be represented by lines of interchange that form networks, networks that support travel, communication and industry for humans. Using these as a nervous system to understand my personal history, the following artworks represent the scope of mark-making I am attempting to use in the global canvas of my work. They represent a few relevant examples of gestures performed in varying spaces and cultural contexts.
The English sculptor Richard Long describes his practice as “Art about mobility.... simple creative acts of walking and marking about place, locality, time, distance and measurement. Works using raw materials and human scale in the reality of landscapes.” 27 A Line Made By Walking (1967) documents Long wearing a line into the ground by walking back and forth in the English landscape28. He wears the grass away, eroding a line into the earth, a relic of his walking meditation. Both Long’s body and the ground are his raw materials. His concentrated treatment his own native territory leaves an artifact of passage, a bald path through the grass that one could imagine seeing from space.
Teresa Margolles ties 127 pieces of cadaver floss across a blank gallery, tying off a section of the space with this moribund ribbon, a blood soaked line29. 127 cuerpos/127 bodies (2006) represents a political narrative “like a kind of unconscious historiography of the brutality of the
27 Long, R. www.richardlong.org, retrieved July 15, 2013.
28 This echoes the efforts of the “Ramblers” who keep ac ve walking trails through nature, that since the middle ages have connected farms, villages and towns all over the Bri sh isles.
29 “The fabrics have been soaked in soil and the body fluids le behind by those who have been murdered, and this forms a kind of archive for the ar st.” Lynn, V. (2012) Restless, Adelaide Interna onal 2012, p14.
20 Mexican social experience.” 30 With this singular gesture in a neutral white space, away from her homeland, she is in dialogue with Mexico’s drug wars. She transplants the violence of her culture into another context with a simple piece of cord. A cord with a history.
The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs walks at the pace of a nonchalant tourist through Mexico City, trailing behind him an articulated blue line, the yarn of his sweater tied to a fixed point (Fairy Tales, 1995). He implicates himself in the mundane patterns of everyday life as he travels through the urban landscape, leaving an ephemeral mark on the city. Through this simple gesture he provides a framework to negotiate his way through the city as a relative outsider.31
The common household doily is a crochet circle reminiscent of the polar coordinate system— both start in the middle and work outwards. Crochet by nature is a system of producing textile that relies on algorithm and the use of one continuous line through repetitive action. In 1995 in Mexico City when Francis Alÿs performed Fairy Tales, had he been traveling a completely straight line with his trail of yarn, this could be described as a moving radial coordinate according to the two dimensional polar coordinate system. The radial coordinate, in relation to a fixed pole (the point to which the yarn is attached), would create a polar axis. The polar axis would tell us the terms of his location which could be framed on a global scale. Interpreted by angle and distance, Alÿs’s action can be interpreted within a system greater than his physical presence on the city street.
The important thing here for me is the reach of something relatively small across a space that is very large, similar to Joan Didion and her great great grandmother’s stitches. My initial interest in this type of mark making evolved from a birds eye view of man on a 21st Century canvas.32 In the 1st century, Pliny the Elder described the origin of painting: “All agree that it began with
30 Cuauhtémoc Medina, Materialist Spectrality, Teresa Margolles, What else could we talk about?, RM Verlag, Barcelona, Spain 2009 for the Venice Biennale.
31 “Alÿs’s lines on the land are part of an ongoing series of projects he calls paseos, or strolls, which he has carried out worldwide, with various props in tow.” Butler, Cornelia H. Zegher, Catherine. (November 21, 2010 - February 7, 2011) On Line: Drawing Through the Twen eth Century. New York: Museum of Modern Art. p 101
32 How do the roots of human representation relate to the reach of our identities in a technological landscape?
21 tracing an outline around a man’s shadow”.33 From this simplification of the human image as a line and a gesture, I arrived at Lev Manovich’s research into digital culture, realizing that we essentially perform our identities through media; we use dynamic clusters of information to maintain profiles of ourselves far beyond the reaches of our physical ability.34
From Pliny’s observations on tracing the human form with a line, I then looked at the shaping of networks, systems of communication represented through lines: the evolution of writing from lines in stone tablets to writing on paper, from Morse code and telephone, to wireless and global internet communication. As radical as this adaptation may seem, essentially we are still tracing man’s shadow.
However complicated a system I am a part of, I can reframe it as a pattern of lines, a network in which I can locate myself on a global scale.35 I relate naturally to the topological networks in which airplanes, automobiles, work patterns, and family heritage continue to play out in my life. I am weaving my own variegated interpretations with relics of cultural encounters along the way. Maintaining this practice in order to better understand my own constant displacement, I am able to catalogue the nonsensical sequences and cultural eccentricities presented to me through the continued experience of my inherited transience. In my work I attempt to use my subjective interpretation of the world by using my own experience as a lens to create work reflecting the nature of systems on a global scale. Living in a digital age, the ubiquitous nature of networks on
33 Saltzman, Lisa. (2006) Making Memory Ma er, strategies of remembrance in contemporary art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. p1
34 “Regardless of the industry and the type of content people and companies produce, it is now taken for granted you need to have a web presence...... all this informa on can be poten ally used to do something that previously was un-imaginable: to create dynamic (i.e. changing in me) maps of global cultural developments that reflect ac vi es, aspira ons, and cultural preferences of millions of creators.” Manovich, L. (March 2009) How to Follow Global Digital Cultures, or Cultural Analy cs for Beginners. retrieved June 1, 2013. h p:// www.manovich.net/ar cles.php
35 “So the poets under high capitalism have anxiously wandered the malls,crowded sidewalks, dried-up rivers, and back alleys of the modernizing city in search of some lost aura or spirit-shining, as alienated into the commodity form, cultural sign, or material technology, and looking back to the diminished maker of global produc on as ‘profane illumina on’.” Wilson, Rob. (2003) Globaliza on, Broken Aesthe cs and the Global Soul. p36. retrieved June 1, 2013. h p://www2.ucsc.edu/aparc/Rob%20Wilson%20for%20APARC/US=Korea=wilson %5B1%5D.pdf_1.pdf
22 all levels of civilization afford me an opportunity for material interplay. The matrix of exchange, my life in transit, informed by my personal crossings, became the thread in my embroidery kit.
Working with abandoned systems during my fieldwork in northwest Iceland, annexing materials left behind by human industry and past life, my enquiry extends to interdisciplinary mark-making through appropriation. I begin using parts of a former herring processing plant to create frozen molds from industrial fishing containers as a way of creating temporal objects that have cinematic qualities. They are objects made of ice that fill the space of nothing and will return to nothing. I begin documenting the fragmented fibers of the shifting tides that support exchanges within capitalist economic infrastructure, communication, and migration in my attempt to thread together an accumulative global weave. I find old Bainbridge punch cards for a Jacquard loom; pre-digital code for weaving wool blankets for international companies. A telephone switchboard for a wind up party line system. I appropriate disused herring nets after the fish are all gone; mountains of colorful nets at a dump that lies at the foot of Prophetess Mountain; discarded trawler mats, borrowed containers for caught fish sold on the international market, an industrial freezer. We film for The Whispering Gallery in the parquetry cafeteria no longer feeding anyone and make morse code from volcanic ash and ice.
In One Ton Drag (2013) I have the keys to the freezer big enough to drive a car around in. I freeze a herring net into a thousand liter block of ice. It’s black and delicate like a Victorian mourning veil, in suspended animation in a frozen vitrine. The herring net is obsolete, the fish gone, and the factory partially repurposed. The one-ton block is tied with a sailor’s knot to a ‘90s imported sports car, one of four in the country. Dragging at the pace of walking, ice skipping and chipping across the tarmac, the trail is wet and slick, snail-like. We circle the Eagle brand freezing plant leave dark black strokes on the tarmac. The disintegrating net becomes like bristles on a brush.36
Iceland is key in its position not only for it’s geological features, but for proximity to international shipping lanes, also on the migrational path of whales and a nesting ground of the
36 One Ton Drag, 2013 fits into the tradition of Making Something Leads to Nothing, Francys Alys (1997), Guitar Drag, Christian Marclay (2000) and Dry Lake Bed drawings by Walter DeMaria and Michael Heizer.
23 arctic tern which migrates farther than any other animal. On the docks of Skagaströnd fish is unloaded, weighed and distributed to the far corners of the industrialized earth. The boats come, the fish comes, the trucks come, the cars come, the workers come, the fish leaves, the boats leave, the trucks leave, the cars leave. One hears the sound of chipped ice still dripping from the machines. The tide goes in, the tide goes out. The fishing trawler Arnar’s crew returns from its six week stint north of Siberia, turns over the crew like a fresh pillow and heads out again. The computer screens glow with the international market price for fish.
24 Chapter 4 LUNGS: EXPANSION AND COLLAPSE, CINEMATIC WORKS
The Whispering Gallery is an intuitive approach to the global systems that were available to me during my fieldwork in Iceland. I wanted to make a film attempting to weave together abstractions of world wide networks under the extraordinary light of the extended Icelandic twilight. I named the film after “The Rescue in Whispering Gallery”, chapter 25 of Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth. A member of an expedition is lost in a network of lava tubes far beneath the earth’s crust and finds he can communicate across many fathoms, his voice traveling the curved labyrinthine walls. The main visual body of the film is the carcass of a sperm whale that lay at the foot of a dormant volcano and entrance to the center of the earth as described by Verne (below the Snæfellsjökull glacier).
I first thought of The Whispering Gallery as a cinematic drawing, a line study. I treated the camera like a meditative walk documenting fibers, lines, and webs creating vignettes of global systems in nature, industry and communication. I wanted to break down my third culture view of the world into tiny fiber to put back together in a video dialogue. Previously I had also made smaller works investigating how textures and filaments can be appropriated from the real world into a gestural drawing for the moving image.
After watching Man Ray films from the 1920’s, I became interested in the mark-making approach of Emak Bakia, the 1926 “cinépoéme.” In the opening sequence a man looks through a strange telescopic device with his eye double exposed onto one of several lenses. He sees surfaces, lines and rayograph37 pins cut with real world images and painterly surfaces. Particles, columns of light, patterns and rhythms appear as a kind of etching on the surface of celluloid. This is most directly referenced (however discretely) in my video work North-South. Two performers stand back to back. They raise a shot gun, each in a synchronized ballet like movement and shoot in a straight line against the back drop of the horizon. The kick back of the shot causes their bodies to bounce against each other, drawing them simultaneously closer as two
37 a type of photogram / cameraless print by Man Ray.
25 bullets speed away from each other creating a single line like a hot metal bullet intaglio on the surface of the screen.
Javier Téllez’s “films combine documentary with fictionalized narratives” as a means to frame his real world subjects in what he calls “a cinematic passport to allow those outside to be inside.” 38 His 16mm black and white film Letter for the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See (2007) is a recreation of the Indian parable “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” Shot almost entirely in close-up, we see six blind people approach an elephant in a forsaken swimming pool in Brooklyn’s disused McCarren Park. Taking turns, they negotiate the surface of the elephant’s skin with their hands.39 The wrinkled skin of the epidermis of the elephant is shown in great detail. Téllez edits together “their ‘moments of tactile recognition’ to coincide with their descriptions of what they feel.” 40 The audio narrative of the sensations of the blind men are the artist’s orchestrated system of enquiry. The pace of the film is dictated by the movements of the people within the scenes. In my own practice, I found that documenting a beached whale (The Whispering Gallery 2013), which I imagine is akin to an elephant in some way, commands great respect. When approaching my subjects in the field, I let them dictate the pace of the shot. I am merely a guest, observing and distanced through the lens of my camera yet able to become involved through focusing in on close details.
Manfred B Steger uses the moral tale of the blind men and the elephant to outline varying views in academia about the forces of globalism. The story of the blind men and the elephant begins when villagers who are fighting ask Buddha to resolve their conflict; they have different points of view on religion. He asks his disciples to bring him six blind men and an elephant, then asking
38 Momin, S. and M. Huldisch, H. (2008) Whitney Biennial 2008. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. p 238
39 One of the most visceral memories I have from my childhood is the skin of my palm against the trunk of an elephant. It exists like a film s ll, the ligh ng set for drama c effect, the sensa on of touch s ll fresh in my mind. I am in the ring of an English big top circus, having my photograph taken with the animal star of the show. I’m si ng on a pla orm for animals, my arm around the trunk of this giant. My own moment of ‘tac le recogni on’ in 1981 reignited by Telléz’s film in New York City in 2008. I was amazed at the hardness of the bristly hairs and the leathery, dry skin of this animal with ny, kind, dark eyes and s ll remember this sensa on.
40 Momin, S. and M. Huldisch, H. (2008) Whitney Biennial 2008. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. p 238
26 each for descriptions of the animal which vary wildly. Buddha resolves the argument in the village, teaching that each man’s view is correct.
Since the blind scholars did not know what the elephant looked like, they resolved to obtain a mental picture, and thus the knowledge they desired, by touching the animal. Feeling its trunk, one blind man argued that the elephant was a lively snake. Another man, rubbing along its enormous leg, likened the animal to a rough column of massive proportions. The third person took hold of its tail and insisted that the elephant resembled a large, flexible brush.41
Each man feels the elephant and has a completely different experience and interpretation of the same beast. Javier Téllez’s scholars see “a warm tyre, a vulture’s wing without feathers, a plastic wall, curtains from a mansion.” 42 As my camera scans the whale’s carcass, I too feel like the blind men and the elephant, that I am attempting to portray a beast I cannot truly see.
Steger writes that globalization is “a process, a condition, a system, a force, and an age.” 43 It is a wind in which I have been a tumbleweed and this influences how “the elephant” looks to me. After my father’s death in an accident several years ago, my family’s global infrastructure seemed to lose its coherence and to fall apart. Subsequently I interpreted the systems in Iceland through the bittersweet lens of fragmentation. I was at the crossroads of many global networks that seemed sharper and more delicate in the arctic light. I searched for and found an abandoned DC-3 aircraft. I documented a decaying sperm whale in the landscape of black lava and tidal flats, returning on three occasions, waiting for the right diffusion of light. For National Fisherman’s Day I collaborated with dockworkers building a series of seven frozen ‘vitrines’
41 Steger, Manfred B Globaliza on, A Very Short Introduc on, Oxford University Press, 2009. p 11
42 Stern, S. (June-August 2008) Javier Telléz, Invisible popula ons; animals, sight, transla on and interpreta on. Frieze Magazine, Issue 116.
43 Steger, Manfred B Globaliza on, A Very Short Introduc on, Oxford University Press, 2009. p 11
27 filled with fish and different types of net. We created frozen stitches at the weigh station, the local/international interstice where fish is weighed and sold to the far corners of the earth,44 while burly cats who live on the docks help themselves to thawing sting ray from ice blocks ranging from small to very large (see appendix).
Globalization can be described as a phenomenon in which international forces expand and contract against each other like a lung. The camera movement of The Whispering Gallery tracks, at a funereal pace, both towards and away from my subjects in the landscape. The images gently tense against each other like a slowly shifting ritual organ. The wider material narrative that occurs in the landscape is filmed as a sequence of marks and fibers which push and pull against the camera.45 In contrast to the “to and fro” treatment of the outdoor scenes, the cinematographic movements of two women I call “The Scanners” are on a horizontal plane, suggesting a weaving motion between the two types of shots. I wanted to use the camera lens as a moving linear device to embody the idea of drawing. The steady drawing motion of the camera determines the pace of the film – interpreting shifting and decaying infrastructures, filament, and particles in great detail.
The Scanners represent the technological connective tissue of the film. Surveying multiple scenes with the intensity of a ritual, they interact almost telepathically, without emotion, and receive information from the landscape through binoculars, headphones and a 50’s telephone switchboard. The Scanners exist in a neutral, interior space, almost suspended in motion - the grey space I know from living inter-culturally. The women survey their subjects like machines through an inter-material line of communication that is intended as a single thread laced through their binoculars, headphones and switchboard. The devices they use all serve to interpret information over great distance. When Axel is lost in the caverns below the surface of the earth and discovers the phenomenon of the whispering gallery he is able to transcend his precarious situation. He is both connected and simultaneously lost.
44 You can’t even buy local fish at the grocery store in town where everything is imported anyway.
45 The Whispering Gallery material narratives combine individual progressions of documented scenes emphasizing scale through cinematographic choices; A mountain of disused ish nets, a beached whale, a DC-3 aircraft used to shelter sheep from the elements, a series of morse code sculptures made from volcanic ash and ice are arranged in series spelling “S.O.S” ( a typically remembered phrase).
28 If my companions were only to remove a few feet from where they stood, the acoustic effect would be over, my Whispering Gallery would be destroyed...46
Whispering gallery waves are a frequency or a vibration that can travel an inter-material line. A systematic motion across space, they exist in a great variety of systems, mimicked in light or vibration so powerful that they can travel the curvature of the globe to skim “ the nucleus of an atom, light up a glass bead or even skim on a star.” 47 Instead of disintegrating in free space, sound waves travel a great distance by skimming along a curved wall or elliptical enclosure.48 Humans in a whispering gallery can hear each other better at a distance by facing away from each rather than trying to shout across the expanse. Similarly, in the age of the internet, we communicate, often intimate thoughts, without seeing each other.
Globalism is the term that best describes the forces that shaped my identity as a member of a third culture. Manfred B. Steger presents the view that the forces of globalization are a series of “social processes that appear to transform our present social condition of weakening nationality into one of globality. At its core, then, globalization is about shifting forms of human contact.” 49 The invisible lines of communication used by The Scanners to negotiate the global symbols in my film can be compared to sound waves in whispering galleries, and these, in turn, are no different to the lines of communication that cross the globe via wireless communication. The Whispering Gallery and the works presented with it represent the first body of work in which I
46 Vernes, J. (1871) A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Chapter 25: The Rescue in the Whispering Gallery. England: Griffith and Farran.
47 Wright, O. retrieved June 03, 2013 h p://mag.digitalpc.co.uk/Olive/ODE/physicsworld/LandingPage/LandingPage.aspx?href=UEh ZU1dvZGUvMjAxMi8wMi8wMQ..&pageno=MzM.&en ty=QXIwMzMwMA..&view=ZW50aXR5
48 Whispering galleries occur in architecture all over the world, from New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, Beijing’s Echo Wall of the Temple of Heaven to the whispering wall of the Barossa Reservoir in South Australia.
49Steger, M. (2009) Globaliza on, A Very Short Introduc on. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p 9
29 attempt to craft a worldwide lattice interpreting the collective systems of humans, animals and machines.50
50 “When one tells a story it is for a listener; and however short the story is, it is highly unlikely that the teller is not occasionally interrupted by his audience. So I have introduced into the narra on that will be read, and which is not a story, or which is a bad one if you have doubts about that, a character that might approximate the role of the reader; and I begin.”.....
“-What? A litany of worn-out vigne es fired from le and right, saying just one single thing known for all eternity, that man and woman are extraordinarily unfortunate beasts.
-Nevertheless the epidemic has won you over, and you have contributed just like any other.”
Diderot, D. (1993[1778]) This is Not a Story/ Ceci N’est Pas un Conte. UK: Oxford Paperbacks. p 17
30 Chapter 5 CAPILLARIES: A NETWORK VIEW OF THE WORLD
Sometime then there must be a history of every one who ever was or is or will be living. As one sees every one in their living, in their loving, sitting, eating, drinking, sleeping, walking, working, thinking, laughing, as any one sees all of them from their beginning to their ending.51
Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress is an abstracted study of genealogy, family, and the psychological inheritance of traits like temper. It begins as a testament of four generations of a “representative family and evolved into a history of the entire human race, reflecting both Stein’s interest in psychology and her obsession with the process of experience.” 52 Joan Didion brings to light important questions about pioneer myth and national identity through the relics of her heritage and pioneer crossings, the collective impact of which I have highlighted as a way of talking about scale. I want to engage now with the personal implications of these inherited networks.
Gertrude Stein once described it as something completely American to “conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving.” 53 By borrowing this American framework, I can describe my own country, my rootlessness. Connected by shared social traits and influenced by personal background, the third culture kids’ most firmly rooted home is within a constantly shifting network.
51 Stein, G. (1995) The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. p 124.
52 Stein, G. “Biography, Gertrude Stein 1874-1946” retrieved June 10, 2013 h p://www.poetryfounda on.org/ search/?q=gertrude+Stein
53Stein, G. (1946) Selected Wri ngs of Gertrude Stein. Vechten, Carl V. (Ed) New York: Random House /The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans - lectures. retrieved July 10 2013 h p://www.archive.org/stream/ selectedwri ngs030280mbp/selectedwri ngs030280mbp_djvu.txt
31 By now I have shown my identity as being defined by a long list of countries and global influences that can be defined as an impossible geographical place. My perspective on the world is informed by the world wide lattice of my personal heritage of impermanence. The incessant rush of roads, planes, economic channels, avenues of communication and maps of family passage have become my personal range of patterns. They are my raw material.
I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundred years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self made, in isolation from it.54
By shaping abstractions of networks I am attempting to form a vast weaving across oceans and continents. The marks I’ve made in my cinematic works are lines of enquiry into my own spatial belonging. I am implicating myself in the systems of other cultures in order to examine my position in relation to them. By documenting the lines and gestures I’ve performed on surfaces of large territories, I am practicing the craft of a third culture, a craft informed by a history of continental crossings.
54Brooks, D. “Social Animal: How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life”. The New Yorker. 17 January 2011.
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36 APPENDIX Works completed during MFA initial research phase but not submitted for final presentation.
A: Bókfærðu (Net Value)...... pp 39-40 Installa on for Na onal Seafarers' Day presented by Strönd Coastal Rescue & NES Ar st Residency, Skagaströnd Iceland. Series of seven ice molds ranging from 1000 - 300 liters, trawler mats, s ng rays, halibut, cod, industrial fishing net and containers.
As the first part of my research in Iceland while comple ng a residency at the NES Ar st Residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland. I was inves ga ng working with ice using repurposed industrial systems in order to make objects that had cinema c quali es. The series I built was an a empt to create objects that served as both a screen and vitrine. One that would have a measured shelf life but act as a temporal mark making ac on. The ice sculptures were produced in collabora on with dock workers and fork li drivers who man the weigh sta on and also nego ate the price for fish on the interna onal fish market. The installa on occupied the lead up to the weigh sta on during the na onal celebra on of the men who work the sea.
B:The Burden Le er Project...... pp 41-42 Four channel installa on, HD video, stereo sound. dura on 15:45.
During my first year of research I undertook a residency at the Contemporary Ar sts Center in Troy, New York. I worked with the Rensselaer County Historical Society and the Burden Ironworks Museum in collabora on with the Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway, an organiza on commi ed to preserving the industrial archeology of Troy. With ar sts, preserva onists and historians, I worked to create a four channel video installa on using the language of film to create a living portrait of the city as influenced by past industrial glory. I asked my subjects to pose as for a historic camera in historic loca ons linked to the early American Industrial revolu on and the underpinnings of globalism.
37 In 1838 Henry Burden, inventor of the 19th century’s most powerful waterwheel penned le ers of longing to his wife Helen in Troy, New York from the good ship Orpheus. His le ers are read by different historians and preserva onists as voice over for the film. Amplifying relics of 19th century industrial glory against global economic collapse and resurrec on, The Burden Le er Project bridged my interest in the evolu on of portraiture to the nature of communica on networks and how they’re used to communicate iden ty.
C: Shelter...... p 43 Repurposed crochet blanket, dowel, gaslight, dimensions variable.
An ongoing series of temporary installments inves ga ng abandoned cra as a fiber for crea ng temporary sites of inhabita on all over the world.
38 39 40 41 42 43 44