This is an article I wrote a while back for a publication in Adelaide. I never got around to editing it properly and something about it always felt a little disjointed. Anyway, seeming as it didn't end up getting submitted I thought i would post it here. Maybe it can be one of those "writing" things that I seemed to be so serious about yesterday!
We were sitting around a filthy glass table in the back kitchen of my friends western suburbs bungalow. It was stinking hot, middle of summer with beads of sweat slipping inconspicuously down the back of my knees. Can of coke in my hand I couldn't wait for the sun to go down so we could all jump in the Suzi and head down to west beach. I spent all my time in this house, wasting time, waiting for my plans to kick in to action.
"we should go around the world in a hot air balloon" I suggested to my friend. "You can navigate, I'll make the sandwiches." He knew every capital city in the world.
Back then I was studying art history, absolutely desperate to be a part of something, to know the world better. A hot air balloon sounded perfect: investigating from the air, going slow so you see more, at the whim of the elements.
Two years later I'm in the midst of my year abroad. Three months in europe, followed by a stint living in London, trying to make the most of what I spent all those years planning. Here the bubble that is my life doesn't always intersect with the art world, I have to make plans, research and navigate towards interesting events. Tonight I dropped in on an exhibition opening at Seventeen gallery on Kingsland road, Shoreditch featuring a new show from Abigail Reynolds called Strange Attractor.
Reynolds bubbling origami facades invite you into a historical world which is swings between a sense of harmony and oddness. Working from a collection of images originally created as bookplates, she has archived the interiors of historical and monumental buildings used in guidebooks. Through slicing several images portraying similar and yet intricately different interiors, and splicing them back together she has created an origami of rooms which begin to boil and bubble inside themselves. You can see the room change as if it alternate dimensions of reality were dissecting the same plane.
Some of these interior patchworks have the complexity of a dividing cell, and yet others more quietly show the rupture between them. Two images split down the centre reveal the subtle sameness of their architecture- a rupture in time and space. Further images, without any alterations, allow you to see the buildings reveal themselves through windows in time: the great archways becoming creatures which haunt the space. You can hardly believe you had never seen the ghost of the building before, its great, blank, stained glass eyes buried in the sockets of the arch.
As I float back and away, up in to the air, it's nice to be able to look back on Reynolds work, to see it as an outsider to the London scene. My travels have exposed me to so much art, the beginning, the Modern and the end. Being a part of the art scene in London is a lot of hard work, something you really have to put your life in to. For now I am happy to be an anonymous traveller (maybe not quite the adventurer that Phileas Fogg was). Give me a couple of years and I might be ready to set my basket down for a while. Until then, there is so much more of the world to see. I better pack some sandwiches!
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