PLATITUDES

Projection, Cardboard, Chrome, and Glass Mirror

A Narrative

I watched this elderly man for some while, drawing in an art class at Aspex in Portsmouth. He had Alzheimer and I could almost feel his hesitant mind trying to map; forcefully connecting resistant parts of the brain and turning ideas slowly as he contemplated the array of pens he had accumulated in front of him. His laboured considerations only countered by his surprisingly decisive “murmurations” of marks, which slowly coagulated into something tangible and eventually filling the available space on the paper.

The Boîte-en-Valise project had an oddly disjointed timeline in a similar way to my experiences reflecting on the Alzheimer group. Nothing flowed logically; encounters gained significance later in the project, slightly out of kilter with the program. At first, I felt the community engagement was a bit of a miss match to the inflatable sculptures I had been working on. The inflatables came about through a search for empathy with the much-copied image of the little three-year old Syrian boy washed up dead on a Turkish beach. What drives a family to take such risks? What is the morality of looking at the image of a dead child? Why does it take the body of a child to prick the hierarchy of our moral conscience and provoke action? I wanted to start building these inflated life rooms; I wanted to inflate everything to turn it into a life preserver.

I am an immigrant, but not the one you imagine when you close your eyes. My children are refugees but not the ones you picture when you are asked to think on status. Much of what I have been thinking about throughout this project is to investigate the lived life, to find an equivalence of experience or at least one I can recall from my past. However, despite sharing some of the language of displaced people in the naming of my status, migrant or outsider, words that might draw understanding actually just widens the gulf between us.

I have taken Boîte-en-Valise and the Generator project as an opportunity to accumulate an ongoing series of experiences that I have continued to make work alongside. It has allowed short periods of public engagement to generate quite radical change to my practice, which might have never happened.

Venice was extraordinary, an opportunity to test work at a platform where I want my practice to be seen regularly. It was short and sharp but very positive. The project was one of constant flux and accumulation, from the US to UK to Venice and back, a shared experience between artists, curators and community groups and individuals.

In the return show to Syracuse the generative lag-time meant that the Portsmouth Alzheimer workshop was just being processed into my thoughts. The man’s fractal perception of his world mirrored what I was experiencing. I have started to work with immigrant groups and activists here in Syracuse, found old churches that are now mosques and towns that are named Hope. I feel things changing again.