The luggage of an immigrant (original) (raw)

Moves towards the incomprehensible wild

2011

The trees are dense now with singing birds, whitethroats, titlark, yellowhammer and the cooing of wood pigeons [...] In the centre of the wood there exists a natural clearing, perfectly level and smooth with glassy lichen, a dark emerald covering [...] A wild deer walks out of the trees, crosses the clearance, and stops to snuff the ground. Large bright eyes search. [...] I watched its glittering brown eyes watching me. The deer’s presence announced a far deeper and stranger reality than any classification of plants and animals [...] The deer momentarily awoke my own wild-side, itself a startled animal ...

Resemblance to Other Animals: Dispossessed Beings, Recounted Journeys and Other Memories

Journal of Communication and Languages, 2020

Resemblance to Other Animals (16 mins, HD, 2019) is a memory work that considers locational effect and its recollection. Its key elements, images of encased taxidermy and a traveller’s voice, offer different temporal plains and positions. The images were shot in the Horniman Museum’s, London, natural history gallery and the recordings were inspired by work related travel, time away from home. These combined sensory streams, conjoined by narrative’s reason, suggest temporal and spatial complexity and the partialness of remembrance. The Horniman Museum is a testament to the Victorian mania for collecting, which was also the time of the ‘memory crisis’ when Bergson, Freud, Proust and later Benjamin were proposing a new intuitive, individuated, understanding of memory. A museum collection creates history, a vision of the past, that is in itself a product of history. Resemblance to Other Animals juxtaposes this site with personal recollection, which relates a sense of place to identity and can challenge institutionalised positions, examining how this correlation can be conceptualised and represented. This examination considers whether the artistic engagement with form and content can formulate a place of creative reckoning, were an imaginative exploration can occur and a different past can be discovered, and if these sensory and conceptual elements can create a memorious investigation that generates new readings.

Lonely Visions of Anxious Objects

Convoluting the Dialectical Image – Special Issue, The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, Taylor & Francis/Routledge, 2019

In much of his work, Benjamin details perennial exclusions, inequities and vulnerabilities to violence not as sudden eruptions, but as repeatable scripts. Indeed, foundational to his formulation of 'historical catastrophe' is repeatability. The catastrophe becomes historicand the historical becomes catastrophicwhen each is revealed as a manufacturing of repeatable practices of dominance. Following questions of coloniality and marked difference, The Arcades Project in both form and content demands we think through both travel as chosen and movement that is forced. Benjamin's Arcades reflects his flâneurism, his displacement, his lonely observations, his chosen and forced movements. How to navigate these documents of Benjamin's marked and different consciousness, his fugitive absorption in displacement? Offering insight is Benjamin's emphasis on historicising the domestic interiorcollections of both objects as well as illusions, which reveal anxieties of coloniality and its markers of difference. Convolute I The Interior the Trace moves through questions of furniture as armament. Throughout, Benjamin's meditations are haunted by colonialism, an anxiety made more precise by the lived experience of Benjamin the immigrant, Benjamin the refugee, Benjamin the different.

Happenings, Sightings and a Plumed Seed

Claire Mc Dermott, 2023

This practice-based research uses sculpture, drawings and verse to make connections between a plumed seed, air and glass. Curiosity about the natural world can engage with historical social and environmental concerns through artifacts and events as well as exploring ideas coming from science. By using the freedom within art, l aim to express an thought provoking documentation. I made comparisons with my field observations (which I renamed as ‘sightings’) and Allan Kaprow's development of art happenings, as both phenomena could provide moments of enlightenment capable of transforming one’s perspective of the world.To avoid confusion, I explore these sightings through poems to give the essence of the event. I also talk about creating happenings while drawing, which creates a space of time where many thoughts become fluid. I seek to form an understanding of the physiology of a plumed seed from the Asteraceae plant family. This includes the external influences the environment may have on it as the seed (also known as a fruit) floats to the ground. I compare three plumed seeds and ask what they look like to understand how they move in the air. This creates an overview of the physical morphology of the plumed seed, its function in aerodynamics and its ability to encapsulate air to aid its flight and how it can use an elastic hinge mechanism to open and shuts its feathery parachute (known as a pappus) in different measurements of humidity.

Words leaking from objects: thinking with absent photographs

The possibilities within notions of the object constitute a special area of interest in my research. As I have come to see it, the object is bounded by -and yet comes to alter-views of representation/re-presentation; it contributes towards academic thinking through its capacity for democratizing and bridging itself towards others -yet it has a history of failing in the exchange of everyday gestures with places seemingly remote from the academia. Although accused of resolution and impermeability, I admittedly cannot part with the word 'object'. And this creates a tension in my work with photography, where I attempt to articulate a personal view of the photograph as something ultimately unfixed. In this view, writing and photography extend continuously and reciprocally into the virtual and the physical from gestures before the photograph and before the word. This text reflects on these tensions, drawing on notions of affect, potentiality and on ethics to discover traces of the other suggested in the physical, but also the imaginary surface of an object. Following Sherry Turkle's notion of 'object' as evocative, in this text 'the things I think with' form narratives that reflect the absence of other(s), and the escaping capacity of absent objects in and out of words.