The Maker
Shellie HoldenMaker in Focus
20 May - 29 June 2014
This small niche in Mission Gallery has created a setting to explore a notion of “topoanalysis” (Bachelard, 1992, p.8), from the perspective of an artist working with and around her domestic space.
This is the place where dust might gather, spiders webs hang, or indeed where a display cabinet might be assembled. What might be preserved or presented in this niche and what does or might this collection say about its ‘owner’ or indeed, the house itself?
Using materials retrieved from her domestic space, (as well as surrounding topology), for this artist, the collection is anthropological in nature, submersed in a sense of memory, feeling, or knowing located in a desire to bundle, gather, bunch, join, wrap, bind, shape, mould, package - processes which cannot fully be described through words alone, but which come into being through an archeological uncovering, embedded in the materials and enveloped in the immediacy of making.
It is also a space to unite the private with the public, the internal with the external. These are some of the polarities wrapped up in the making of the work oscillating between the fixed and floating, the solid and eroding, the hidden and concealed, the stable and the crumbling. Underlying this is a compulsion to revive from the past the detritus, debilitated, damaged - the left behind, misunderstood, forgotten or lost, to make the invisible visible again.
Topoanalysis,
‘the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. In the theatre of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles. At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability- a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things, wants to ‘suspend’ its flight. In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for’.
Bachelard, Gaston, (1992), The Poetics of Space, Boston, Beacon Press
