The only problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
The Cost of Choosing
Each choice we take, as we make our progress through the world, living our lives, comes at a cost. Sometimes the costs are immediately apparent, other times these costs become clearer later.
Even our successes come at a cost; of what might have been – be careful what you wish for.
The Human condition is complex, and success can paradoxically weaken our capacity for empathy.
Seemingly insignificant decisions can echo down the decades. Our famously neuro-plasticity apparently petrified.
Je ne regrette rien
Is a life without regret a life lived…?
Suffering is widely held to be inevitable – from such diverse thinkers as the Buddha to Friedrich Nietzsche, though their conclusions and strategies could scarcely be more different. Some regard suffering, the adversity of it, as something that makes us stronger.
Certainly, persisting through suffering requires tenacity, sometimes of the most meagre sort; but does it confer strength?
Does Life build us up, or wear us down; does what appears to be the ease of maturity actually come from a process of erosion? Streamlined, we slip through our days more easily, having had our rough edges worn down, as we look over our shoulders at the golden light from our past.
My family, me then an only child, emigrated to Canada. We would stay for 4 years, and I would return to London an older brother to my baby sister, with only hazy recollections of summers spent on the lakes.
A brief hiatus at home in London, then we continued our travels – this time closer to home; Furneux Pelham, Hertfordshire, where my brother would arrive to complete the family.
Again, summer fills my memories – eating sun-warm Victoria plums, sitting in the tree I had just picked it from. Yet there were darker, unspoken currents beneath this. Fleeting memories, overheard harsh words.
Though memories of this time are fragmented, certain events persist, apparently crystal clear – this is one of them. One Spring, I was given a bike for my birthday. After a period on stabiliser wheels, I eventually got the hang of staying upright. That summer, due to take my bicycle proficiency test, I reasoned that the safest response to my fear of failure was to simply not turn up. A careful, private silence was key.
I used the same ploy a year or two later, at the primary school I would attend for just two terms, to avoid the spotlight of the school production of Alice in Wonderland. I was to have been a number card.
But what was this really about? Yes, there was fear of failure, of being seen as less than adequate or whole. But underneath that, something quieter and more human. A yearning. A desire to be passive, to be found, to be held. The strategy was avoidance. But the hope, unspoken even to myself, was the opposite of avoidance. It was an invitation.
Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that when I came to make work, I was drawn instinctively to things that were broken. Not despite their brokenness, but because of it. A broken object makes no claim to usefulness or perfection. It simply exists, honestly, as what it is. In asking people to entrust me with something damaged — something they might otherwise hide or quietly discard — I was, I think, asking them to do what I had never quite managed myself. To offer the imperfect part. To be found.
My work is exploratory in nature. I don’t have a clear idea of what the finished work will look like, or when it is finished.
So, back when I put out a call for participants for this piece, all I knew is that I needed BROKEN objects – items with no utility; these items were then immediately transformed into things with their own integrity – art objects – and as such deserving of care.
Each object was carefully wrapped in plain paper and tied with string — handled with the attention a broken thing deserves.
I also knew I wanted to use this exchange as a way to connect, so I paired the participants randomly.
The contributors are inherently then a part of the work. To reflect this, I drew a visual representation of the network of the relationship between the items and contributors – a map – and made a certification system that stands as the tangible artefact for the exchange.
The subtext here is critical – each pair knows something only about their object – not their counterpart’s.
What becomes clear in the broader context is that the items are the medium of the piece, but not the artwork itself.
The representation of the relationships emerges as a key part of the work, as is the hidden quality inherent in the pairing. For exhibition, the relationship map was installed in a temporary, site-specific manner using black duct tape. However, the map itself is only a representation of an aspect of the work, a device – not the work itself either.
Walter Benjamin’s text The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) presents us with a paradox. How do we value an artwork that has been made widely available, yet severed from the specifics of its time and place? The difference between standing before da Vinci’s Mona Lisa at The Louvre, and turning over a postcard of her in the gift shop.
However, an artwork whose medium is relational space and elapsed time cannot be reproduced, because there was never a singular physical object, time or place to reproduce. So the map – a record, or pointer, back to something real that happened, between these people, through this time – stirs either the memory, or the imagination.
We circle back to the aspect of the time taken in reaching some degree of completion. A period of life, confusion, apprehension, reflection, relocation. And I am sure this is true for us all. Through a period of well over a decade, this text comes from me to you as a time capsule of how we were. Then how we are. And how we never escape our history entirely; merely learn how to coexist with it.
And this becomes another layer to the work, which I now understand as an intangible object. It exists in the space between each other – between the pairs, between the artist and the contributor, and between the reader and the text.
My childhood avoidance strategy echoed down the years.
I graduated in 2013. And although complete enough for me to be awarded my degree, this piece has taken 13 years for me to close the loop, back to you, who first saw fit to participate in this project. This text is an integral part of the work, particularly for me. I learned decades ago to trust the process, and to take note of what is revealed.
I tell this anecdote as a personal reflection of this artwork. What life takes from us all. Unseen to the outside world, we ‘adult’ our way, day in day out, carrying the wounds of yesteryear as we face our dwindling future. There is something both humbling and oddly freeing in that recognition – to sit with the fact that we are all, in some measure, works in progress. Incomplete. Carrying cracks.
The fear of being seen, or worse, found out, is something I believe we all face in some aspect of our lives.
Perfectly imperfect, we need change nothing, except perhaps, the kindness and acceptance we show to ourselves, and the grace we show each other.
The text piece printed and folded — plain cover, the title and the epigraph, nothing else.…
The pairing system worked out by hand in a sketchbook — red lines crossing between two…
The printed certificates stacked on cardboard, still warm from the printer — each one numbered, signed,…
The network map across 4 planes of the walls of the Truman Brewery — the tape…
The duct tape lines converging on a single point — the brickwork underneath making it rougher…
A second view of the duct tape piece at Hendon — the lines running up the…
The objects before they went anywhere — each one wrapped and taped, gathered in a pile…
The network lines, the embossed seal, the small green stamp with the name of the piece…
Black duct tape on the white wall and floor — the network of exchanges rendered in…
An early iteration of the piece in dialogue with Long’s wall text works — the list…