Installation of Liminal Sites: Materialising an Everyday. "The Codex Series"; "Her Room"; "Days"

My making practice for the last five years has been predominantly occupied with undertaking a Masters Degree programme that was practice based research. I did this as a part time student for two reasons: firstly, my domestic life is very full and rich with multiple ongoing demands that I value and consider worthy of spending time on and secondly, my making uses slow processes and my ideas take long consideration to properly devolve.  In the middle year I had a gap and attended just to domestic matters. This mission has been successfully achieved and I am now waiting to be capped 1st class honours which is a relief and a thrill.

This post is about my final examination installation, hung in September in 2015 at Percy Thomson Gallery in Stratford Taranaki.

The overall title of the exhibition was Liminal Sites: Materialising an Everyday. It was comprised of three installation elements.

The Abstract from my Exegesis follows:

            This visual art research practice examined the daily actions undertaken in a personal domestic everyday with a view to understanding its cultural significance. Across a period of 549 days intentional, mindful observation, and reflective record making were undertaken. Through the chronological accretion of minutiae and the trace of what is normally unseen or invisible, the patterns of time in the everyday were investigated and evaluated as value markers. The role of reinterpretive preservation or meaning maintenance to create, support and reflect individual identity and social position were examined and chronicled. To further explore the materialisation of this everyday as sites of understanding, differing durational practices using coding, diaristic recording, and textile-based media and processes were employed in the creation of symbolic representations. The domestic everyday was revealed as a site of active choice, liminal transferral processes and the flow of essences amongst the three different spheres, the personal, the domestic and the public.

The basic principle that underpinned the approach to the entire research project was explained by Mikhail Bakhtin as follows:

"The world in which an act or deed actually proceeds... is a unique world that is experienced concretely: it is a world that is seen, heard, touched, and thought, a world permeated in its entirety with the emotional-volitional tones of the affirmed validity of values. The unitary uniqueness of this world [is] guaranteed for actuality by the acknowledgment of my unique participation in that world, by my non-alibi in it. [I] come upon this world, inasmuch as I come forth or issue from within myself in my performed act or deed of seeing, of thinking, of practical doing." [1]     

Informed by this central concept my research was based in my own domestic everyday life. It was founded in a detailed practice of "seeing" what my everyday actually was, rather than assuming what it was. I undertook diaristic recording and observational practices.

This research practice took the reiterative and repetitive time that structures much of the quotidian and used it as both a subject and a practice material. Ritualised processes that resulted in longitudinal accretions, evidencing time’s passage, recorded the content of the cyclical dispensations of value as time. The durational recording actions synthesised time into a spatial presence - an act of liminal transfer.To undertake an extended rule-based practice that was focused on contemplative recording of the practice of my existence engaged the very obdurate nature of temporality to generate the materialisation. The cycle of the day always occurred and triggered the rules of the cycle of the recording.  This recording produced a timescape which Holland describes as "a temporal vista that brings into focus a micro-temporal view of the world, and can in this way  . . . give insight into the dynamic unfolding of real lives. Temporality, its different meanings and the way the different temporalities intersect and play out,"[2] is the essence of the everyday. Through the durational practice evidence was accrued of the variability of the timescape. No two records are the same - the domestic everyday is a continuously shifting and morphing phenomenon. As Lefebvre states: "life is trapped in an intermediary zone between cyclic and rationalized linear time."[3] There are differing timescapes that intersect with each other and that are woven through the different realms of the domestic everyday.

The first of these practices created the "Daily Log" which was a pragmatic listing of everything I undertook or was engaged with that supported my domestic existence as based in my home. From this, detailed analysis was undertaken into what my time was spent on. I considered that where I spent time was at sites of value to myself and those in my domestic context. Those tasks or engagements that held no deep value for me did not get time spent on them. Two other diaristic recording and reflective practices were developed from the "Daily Log". 

The first of these diaristic works derived from "The Daily Log" was called "The Codex Series" which is pictured below. Every day for a calendar year I used the masthead of the local Taranaki newspaper as a base to build a symbolic, emotively reflective collage record of my daily mundane activities. Each undertaking was assigned a material and these were applier using hot wax to either the front of the page - for the morning, or the reverse face for the afternoon. The materials were selected from my studio supplies that were on hand that were sedimented with emotional significance for me. Their formats could be infinitely varied to reflect my response to the engagements on that particular occasion. This was a material code. 

Overview of "The Codex Series" Installation with the material code "translation" banner running above the diaries.

Close-up view of "The Codex Series" and some of the material code banner. 

Each element of "The Codex Series" was distinctive, covers

Detail of "The Codex Series"

The second diaristic practice that was generated from "The Daily Log" was called "Her Room".

Overviews of "Her Room", a 365 day diary. This diary is recorded on two faces of the fabric, one face is a stream of consciousness record about the pragmatic parts of my mundane everyday.  The opposing face is about my inner world - my private world of creativity. The pragmatic side is recorded in ball point pen  it was installed to face into the "room", the inner world is recorded in HB pencil - it is more fugitive.  The fabric created a liminal site where the thoughts informing my reality in my everyday domestic situation were materialised. These records run continuously across the drops of fabric and down the length of the drops. 

Please see the second blog post about "Her Room" if you are interested in my reflective and evaluative observations recorded while creating this work. It is called Reflections and Observations on "Her Room" - The Creating Process. https://silktangles.blogspot.co.nz/2017/11/reflections-and-observations-on-her.html

The third element of the installation was referred to as "Days". I have subsequently renamed this piece "Days - A Liminal Site". There is a separate blogpost about this work.

Overview of "Days - A Liminal Site"

Detail of "Days - A Liminal Site"

The permanent link to my Exegesis in Scholarly Commons is http://hdl.handle.net/10292/9755.

[1] Michael E Gardiner, "Bakhtin's Prosaic Imagination," in Critiques of Everyday Life (Taylor & Francis Books, 2000). 52. Quoting Bakhtin 1993: 56-7.

[2] Janet Holland, "Timescapes: Living a Qualitative Longitudinal Study," Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research[Online] 12, no. 3 (2011). 

[3] Lefebvre. 84.