Jenny. Stalybridge, 11/11/10, 15.50pm

Dad. 23/10/10. Elevator Gallery, Hackney Wick. 13.30pm.

The Bodies are Piling Up…

No more people to be made until I manage to get rid of one. It’s ridiculous. In the mean time, just repairs and alterations.

Mum

Abandonments at Elevator Gallery

I will be performing an abandonment as one of the artists in Elevator Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition “Vanishing Point”.

More details here.

I never really thought of Abandonments as being able to slot into another exhibition, but the premise of making work not to be seen sits so well with the contrary nature of this project. 

The person I’m going to abandon here is my Dad. It seems appropriate for someone who admits feeling alienated by much of contemporary art, to be abandoned in a contemporary gallery. 

It is with a certain amount of guilt that I include my Dad in this project, because I know the idea of it will trouble him. Of course, it is from my Dad that I’ve inherited lot of my values, beliefs and fears in the first place. So this is about his beliefs and fears too, and unlike me, he enters into it involuntarily. My Dad says often that he has “no imagination,” but what I think he means is, that he wishes he didn’t.

The Bird

And yet.

I was going to do the first abandonment today, with the Jenny figure. Very tense and anxious this morning (why, really?) but weather bright and sunny. Good for photos, and this matters when they’re so strictly limited.

Unfortunately, as I was going to collect my cameras from the studio, there was a sudden outbreak of thunder, lightning, darkness and rain. Appropriately dramatic and suspiciously short-lived; as soon as I agreed that I wouldn’t go, it stopped.

Jenny was a bad person to start this off with. Like all objects of unrequited love, she makes me paranoid and superstitious. I suppose what the project partly deals with, is my superstitions. Part of me worries when I make the images and figures, that I am willing tragedy onto the real person. What I fear most is that, having drowned, burned, buried or lost somebody’s image, that something will happen to that person and I will know, however illogically, that I’m culpable. I had a similar fear of taking photographs, when I was much younger. I would snap my cherished little sister, at a birthday party, or in her first communion dress, and think “this is the photo they will show on the news…”