Thursday, October 15, 2009

Abandoned villages in Hong Kong - my research... - Part 2

Further research, and a quote from my artist-statement-in-progress. Thoughts and critique very welcome (but please be gentle!).







Beyond the fold in the map
Objects can tell the story of a place and the people that lived there, about their lives, about their connections to the wider world. Objects have their own lives* and live on beyond us. They fill our folk/daily life museums: the "modest and cast off remains of other people's everyday lives"**.
These quotidian objects, once transformed into raw clay, somehow signify both the particular (that particular object taken from that particular place) and the typical (that object as commonplace within a particular culture or period). This allows the viewer to bounce between these two points, between seeing the object as an instillation or trace of a particular narrative, and seeing the object as a specimin to be categorised, labelled, displayed.
Placing the clay model back into the space from which the original was taken re-contextualises the object itself and the surrounding space. The viewer is forced deeper (into imagining the stories located in that place) and simultaneously pushed back (into seeing the objects as if through a glass case).
*See The Social Life of Things edited by Arjun Appadurai
**Patrick Wright, Living in an Old Country

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