Meaghan Thurston
subjectivity memory power of place identity experience
DOM the place-based interventions of Katy Bentall
material culture dobre , poland by meaghan thurston
The first photograph I take of the house is of my reflection in the window. I am on the outside looking in. The window pane is absolutely filthy; spider webs smear the glass.
I arrived in the small Polish village of Dobre in June of 2010 with the artist Katy Bentall and her teenage daughter. We were there to visit the house DOM, Bentall’s art project in place-making. Dom in modern Slavic means home , a cognate of the Latin, domus . Pani Chopek had lived in the small house until age and illness demanded she move to the city with her children. After Bentall bought the Chopek house, which borders her own home in the village, she documented in watercolour its contents, then she began to engage in ‘interventions’ or acts of private performativity, rearranging the objects found in the house and writing on the walls.
Camera in hand I unbolt the door and step inside. Boards creak and sink under foot.The smell of decay fills my nostrils. For decades a Polish woman and her husband lived in this home, cooking, washing, and bathing; writing and reading the letters left behind, meticulously winding balls of string. Cloth bundles are arranged on one of the beds. It is as though the resident has gone out for groceries and may return at any moment to be surprised by a foreigner poking about in her humble home.
I was investigating the concept of home , following the lead of artists such as Gordon Matta-Clarke, Catherine Bertola, Rachael Whiteread and Louise Bourgeois. However, I felt disconnected from the very subject of my research. How was I to write of the contemporary artistic (re)imaginings of home and its emotive associations, from the library? Katy Bentall is interested in experience, with the self in space and with the space of the woman artist. My thesis supervisor was interested in ‘the capture of the experience.’ So it was that I arrived at DOM pulled in these different directions which, however, converged on this dirty, dusty old house. It was the meeting place.
12
I make a frame with the lens around a tin wash-basin, scarred with rust spots. A bar of soap, etched by fingernails, is in its holder to the side of the basin. Three empty tubes of artists’ paints lie in the basin. They are out-of-place. In an adjacent room, discarded clothing, furniture and papers hang about. From the ceiling a ‘meadow’ of old straw falls loosely to the floor.
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