And I Paused
e.t. life projects: And I Paused
Borough Road Gallery, 103 Borough Road, London SE1 0AA
23–24 August 2018
Part of the Borough Art Labs programme
In conservation, dissociation is one of the recognised agents of deterioration. It describes the loss of objects, or of the information that gives them meaning, as a result of the natural tendency of ordered systems to come apart over time. A label goes missing, a record is misfiled, and an object becomes separated from its own story. Dissociation is rarely dramatic. It happens through small, everyday human decisions.
I brought And I Paused by e.t. life projects into the Borough Art Labs programme because it sets those two kinds of order side by side: the way thoughts are arranged in a human mind and the way an archive arranges its holdings. Every collection is organised through choices, about what to call a work, how to tag it and which category it belongs in. Those choices are usually invisible, but they shape how everyone who comes after will find and understand the work. The exhibition asked whether we can trace those decisions, and whether the loose, associative way we actually think can ever be reconciled with the fixed terminology an archive needs. It also asked whether the breakdown of an ordered system, far from being only a loss, might open up a different kind of understanding.
The works are photocopy collages made from dictionary pages. During each copy, the artist moves the original under the scanning light, so the machine records movement where it expects a still page. The result sits between states: lines of text stretch into solid bands of ink, and the images are neither decoration nor readable prose. The dictionary, the most familiar system for fixing words and their meanings, comes apart.
For me, the exhibition connected directly to questions at the centre of my research into how people interact with digital collections, where tagging and categorisation decide what can be found. It showed the Borough Road Collection Archive as a system that is always being made and unmade.
Artist's statement
"Caught somewhere between states, between lines of text and a solid line of ink, these images are neither decorative art nor prose. I am instead creating a physical pause within the process of a photocopy by moving the image with the laser. Very broadly, as a neurodiverse thinker who likes to experiment with generating patterns for print, these copies/collages seek to destroy the system of the dictionary. The dictionary is a familiar representation of words, language and communication. Some neurodiverse thinkers have trouble grasping these components and so create their own alternative versions in order to communicate effectively. The flexibility of language is being celebrated here, alongside a critique of the complex rules that govern even the smallest of interactions."
— e.t. life projects
