There is a disturbing strangeness about an unfamiliar place. In order to comfortably inhabit a place which is saturated with the aura of other persons, a visitor may attempt to create a sense of place by rearranging things. ‘It is striking that when we arrive in a new place to stay for even a short visit’, writes place-scholar Edward Casey, ‘we tend without any premeditation to establish a group of fledgling habits such as putting the drip grind coffee in a particular spot, our laundry in another [...] These are habituating actions: they help us to get, and stay, oriented’. 1 One of my first questions to Katy Bentall was about the dirtiness of the place. ‘How can you work in DOM? It is filthy, and the air is mouldy.’ For Bentall, dirt and stain are pivotal to her art making: ‘This is a statement on femininity. Accepting the unacceptable – accepting the feminine – my art is an acceptance of the stain – it’s in me’. Does the detritus of our life hold a truth? ‘My interventions are very light’ she explained. ‘It’s easy to wipe me away as an artist. I’m not blowing things up. I’m like a spider, weaving a web.’ Bentall is engaged in a practice with little precedent in the commercial art world. Hers are not interventions arranged by the curator or the museum and she does not exhibit her work in a gallery. To experience Bentall’s work at DOM, or anywhere else, one needs to be explicitly invited to do so. Attuned to the specificities of the place in which she is working, her place-based art practice happens within the frame of the site.
There is a large armchair in DOM of stained and faded blue fabric. Behind it bright sunlight streams through a window. A spider web floats in the air between a bed board and the windowsill; a small pile of sawdust has accumulated around the chair’s legs, the work of the termites (something which at the time I took this photograph I did not notice). This chair waits, arms open, to embrace the sitter after a long day of work.
My role as the photographer of DOM, the place and DOM, the art project made me think about the ways that art can communicate the fragile, idealised bond that human beings have to place . The photographic image causes the viewer pause by igniting a memory, or by providing a window into a past with which we have no direct experience; however, when we take a photograph, transforming lived place into an image, what becomes of the experiential value of place? Yi-Fu Tuan’s metaphor,‘place is a pause in movement’ may provide an answer. ‘The pause makes it possible for a locality to become the centre of felt value’. 2 The camera shutter is a pause in movement too, and Bentall’s work reveals that the location of meaning and memory is not static, but is enlivened by the accidental stains and traces of the bodies it has enfolded. How DOM appeared when I left has already been altered, remade, re-imagined or forgotten, as it is in all places that never stop changing. n
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1 Casey, Edward. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. p151 2 Tuan,Yi-Fu, Space and Place:The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. p138
Meaghan Thurston
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