Acknowledgements
Miscreating Sculpture Studios wishes to acknowledge the incredible work of all our members. We wish to thank our members for their creativity, patience, and support throughout the making of this publication.
Miscreating Sculpture Studios is so grateful to all the members who made the time to collaborate on this project with us. Thank you so much for lending your skills as designers, as makers, as writers, as readers, among many other things. This publication could not have come about without these efforts and is a direct result of the collaboration and communal creativity of our fifteen members, and we are so thankful for them all. With a special thanks to all eleven contributors to this publication: Freida Breen, Silvia Koistinen, Neil Brosnan, Alicia Clooney, Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe, Sorcha McNamara, Shannon Byrnes, Maria McSweeney, Barry Devery, Finn Nichol, Clara McSweeney
Con | finement, I hope these parameters find you well in these strange and uncertain times.
Table of Contents Studio Bio ...................................................................................................................................................................................pg.9 Publication Brief .....................................................................................................................................................................pg.11 Introduction ...........................................................................................................................................................................pg.14 Freida Breen/The container, contained and in-between ...................................................................pg.21 Linking Text: Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe /The point between ....................................................................pg.32 Silvia Koistinen/The touch of space ...................................................................................................................pg.39 Neil Brosnan/The unending editing of incompleteness .....................................................................pg.48 Alicia Clooney/Maker as Material ..........................................................................................................................pg.55 Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe/Surface Occupation ...................................................................................................pg.65 Linking Text: Silvia Koistinen/in altered state ................................................................................................pg.76 Linking Text: Silvia Koistinen/there in essence ...........................................................................................pg.78 Sorcha McNamara/Skies/Ledges ........................................................................................................................pg.80 Shannon Byrnes/Confined in Monotony ......................................................................................................pg.89 Maria McSweeney/DP Postcard Project .........................................................................................................pg.99 Barry Devery/Spider Brain ....................................................................................................................................pg.109 Finn Nichol /There is a Field ...................................................................................................................................pg.117 Linking Text: Alicia Clooney/We’re trapped with the things ..........................................................pg.124 Clara McSweeney/The Human Hot Water Bottle .................................................................................pg.129 Conclusion ..........................................................................................................................................................................pg.139
Studio Bio
Miscreating Sculpture Studios is an artist collective and non-profit studio space founded in July 2020 in Limerick City. Developed for and by early career artists, Miscreating operates with an ethos of holding; the curatorial and custodian action of care and support. We seek to be a generative and nurturing incubation space for developing practitioners. Through the provision of a sustainable studio site and accessible online programs, we encourage communication, experimentation and the creation of an environment in which contemporary practices can grow in meaningful ways. Dialogue in these spaces is focused towards the exchange of knowledge, peer driven education and the sharing of research, allowing each member to contribute actively to the ever growing collective identity of Miscreating Sculpture Studios.
Con|finement, I hope these parameters find you well in these strange and uncertain times. Etymology Con (Latin) meaning with, thoroughly, together. Finis/Fines (Latin) meaning end, limit, border, territory (plural)
Brief The physical site is highly feared and contested as a shared site in 2020 and now into 2021. These pages, as they occupy planes of physicality, are able to be a shared site and interconnect between artist’s works. These are the conditions of digital making, the digital space is the architectural parameters of a room and for this publication this is how we would like it to be treated. Utilize the tools of the software as material for the work. We react to the parameters of isolation with a digital common space. Breaking open and closed the confinement of the digital stage, the enforced communal space of 2020/2021. The page is a site - An architectural framework with a different set of borders and boundaries. Physical site and digital space – one as the other? How do you resolve that idea as artists, as sculptors, makers, as someone that manipulates the world with more than one sense? Where does the tactile go? What material or sensory tool do we have in this digital stage? How do you translate or work the conceptual and perceptual language of the tactile when you are working on digital platforms?
Here, the image or the material is to be considered an object on the site of the page. We are asking that the work respond to the idea of being confined - held in a place with specific parameters that equally suspend reality and open up to a freedom to construct or deconstruct boundaries. There are three requirements to define an area as a confined space: 1. Limited Openings for Entry and Exit: A confined space may be difficult to enter and perform work. If something goes wrong while you are inside a confined space, escape may be difficult. If the space has limited ways to get in and out, it could be a confined space. 2. The Space is not Intended for Continuous Human Occupancy: This means that the space was designed to hold something other than people. 3. The Space is Large Enough for You to Enter and Conduct Work: If you cannot fit your body into the space you cannot become trapped inside
Introduction This publication was initiated by a brief shared with members of Miscreating Sculpture Studios, and is comprised of 11 artists all responding and connecting to the title:
Con | finement, I hope these parameters find you well in these strange and uncertain times The conversation was initiated over Zoom, and artists continuously showed works in progress and discussed the approach each individual was taking to the positioning of their works/practice. Miscreating asked each artist to consider how they intentionally position their work in a digital site, and how that changes the parameters of the installation, for example via screen and the capacity of pixilation. In response, the artists worked both sympathetically and defiantly with tools of the software, continually adjusting the narrative of the process and raising a multitude of questions around the digital experience of a body of work and furthermore the collective experience of the digital:
Have we restricted our practices by confining - isolating- the works within these constructed boundaries, or is this space an exponential opportunity for work to be resolved? Is there an impact on the page/space of our artworks? Is there an impression of our bodies? Are we, as materially based artists, occupying the same site through this experience? Can this digital space be a shared site of exchange?
As a collective, engaging in this activity, can it be said that we have occupied one space by creating a set of contextual and thematic relations, or are we distinctly separated by the manner, and time, in which this project has been approached?
In these pages, we reconsider how to occupy the physicality of digital space - the impact of the sensation of confinement - and how artists may communicate/mediate their work in a digital architecture within the collective circumstances of this time. The pages act as a testing site, a self aware set of digital walls, floor, and parameters, where artists were invited to occupy the same space, collectively impacting a predetermined digital site of exchange, inhabiting with intentionality in order to understand its restrictions and elasticity.
Confinement For many of the participating artists, the parameters of the digital caused specific restrictions, particularly for those with materially/tactile based practices. Working within the digital realm was a form of confinement in and of itself. We have always lived with and navigated our way through various forms of confinement. The pandemic heightened our awareness of confinement as we became physically confined/restricted to our own localities. Confinement can be both limiting and/or limitless. It relies on ones’ perception, on its contextualisation. Its boundaries/borders/edges are forever fluctuating, fluid. The conditions of materialisation for many of the works you will encounter here rest upon an analogy between the digital space of the page and the architectural parameters of a room. By imposing the architectural framework of the page, using text to walk through works and filtering pieces of conversation into one another, we hope to ask questions of how the artist’s intentions and body’s impacts are loosened and confined by the digital medium, and hope to provide an answer through the practice of continued occupation.
Inhabitors In these strange and uncertain times, our collective mode of inhabiting space has altered in response to a growing sense of confinement, as encounter is increasingly constrained, curtailed or redirected to digital realms. Inhabitance acknowledges that time given to a site allows for a gradual acquisition of rights. The rights gathered are residual, or granular in nature. Sand and salt of ownership. These are the grains of rights of the inhabitor. The digital room is just another site, which has built up rights of inhabitancy. A language and pattern of its own, which we have grown to understand at the same rate as it is being built. Gaining an understanding of the rhythms of internet spaces, is the same daily unknowable state as the knowledge of one’s own skin; familiar, and unsettling, different each day, rising and falling, getting comfortable in the flesh and folds and daily fluctuation of the internet’s hormonal body. We are still inhabitors. We are used to leaving the knowledge of our weighted self and all its material repercussions, and settling into the weightlessness of digital parameters. In essence, this is the intention set forth by all the artists within this publication. Through each individual method of understanding, the gravity of the digital space has to be employed to sit here and impact these simulated pages. This provides the material parameters and enforces the medium limitations of pixel, light, and plastic. These parameters will always be synonymous with the physicality of experiencing the pandemic. Certain words, certain websites, will be ghosts of this experience. Zoom was a sound effect, now turned into an office, living room, lecture hall. The pandemic has been a material experience for all our bodies, mostly activated through a new medium.
It is this medium we situate ourselves within, as we attempt to construct a digital space for this body of artists to occupy and impact collectively. Physical space for artists can develop into a form of language, or of family. Familial space, space open to you, and made for you to occupy. The questions posed within these texts allow the site of the page to take on that point of occupation.
Digital Intimacy There is an intimacy in the shared awareness of space that is cultivated, in order to collectively impact a site. Makers have an intense instinct to occupy space, as if it was a commodity to be consumed, swallowed with the sheer experience of it. Where a building was the material to be stretched. A series of inferred and indirect actions and interactions that grow the collective atmosphere of proximity. This communally impacted space. Can this collectivity translate to the connectivity of digital spaces? Within a physical site we are all collectively aware of each other's movements, our height, our voice, our shadows. However, the one does not impact the other. These elements, merged into a collective body-space, do not operate in the same way here, different channels of sound cannot compete for one another, and the bodies’ limitations to the form of the screen. Each individual holding full control of the limits of their own body, muting and unmuting, moving away from the common moment at hand. As we cannot learn from the accidents of objects and voices in the same room, we are not in a site open enough to impact one another. Without, the works cannot be understood as a collective body, a common experience.
Here, we seek a digital communal space, where bodies of thoughts and materials can sit together, and we can perceive a collective weight of responses to a series of questions. Declaring as inhabitants of this page, we are using this space as a material for collective communication within the confines of our own making.
The pages that follow are positioned in relation to these identified thematic strands but critically within the context of a global pandemic; this moment of lived experience, and the shifting spaces that we are now inhabiting. The aim of this publication is to hold space for the featured artists to explore, materially and conceptually, the parameters of a growing sense of confinement as encounter is increasingly redirected to digital spaces. We are ever delighted and grateful to our members for collaborating with Miscreating Sculpture Studios to create this, for the conversations, and the repositioning or generating of some many varied forms of practices and considerations to this collective experience of confinement.
Freida Breen The container, contained - and in between
These images emerge from a thematic and aesthetic exploration of the space of the container. Each composition depicts a pause-point in the progression of a material drift, reflecting the conditions of its making, during the unanticipated pause-point of a worldwide pandemic. Within the confines of a glass tank, ink falls from a floating piece of paper into water where it permeates and dilutes, entering into multiple interactions and resonances, tracing numerous trajectories so that the space of the container becomes a site of energy, tension and possibility. In this form of aleatory image-making, the container maintains a kind of continuity: the container holds. And yet, its boundary is not conclusively fixed. These arrested moments of material experience are projected out from the space of the container, and they are also influenced by transitory spatial elements (sunlight and shadow) that are internalised into the space of the container. The container thus plays a mediating role at the boundary of inner and outer.
Through the boundary of the screen that mediates your experience of viewing these images, relations of value between tonal blues and whites and the contrast of light and dark, evoke what the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze called tactile-optical space (1) . Through depth and contour, forms take on a sculptural quality, producing the illusion of three-dimensional space. Though we cannot literally touch the materials, through the container, through the screen, we intuit a sense of their tactility in this kind of haptic visuality. Sensation and sense experience are thus, unmoored things, capable of permeating the boundaries of the container. A thematic consideration of the space of the container brings me to thinking about it in human terms as an important structure around which we organise our lives. From our earliest moment we are contained physically within another, and when we emerge our need for psychological containment continues. As adults, we play the role of container and contained and we find that relationship involves an action of holding. The architecture that surrounds us involves the creation of planes on the horizontal and vertical, that envelop space- mediating inside and out- and offering containment.
In a year marked by discontinuity, our own internalised space seeks, all the more, a sense of constancy. In spending time in the microcosmic space of these materials, this inchoate watery drift, I think about the impossibility of determining all aspects of experience and the tenuousness of the structures that contain us. Whether we look inward or outward, we find a kaleidoscopic, ever-shifting pattern of actions and reactions. Perhaps like these arrested images, glimpsed moments of wholeness are all we can ever have; a kind of intuited wholeness, a feeling that something has been consolidated, held, just for that moment.
(1) Deleuze, G. (2005: 11) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe
The point between “A holder. A recipient.” (Le Guin 1995) We enter the process of experiencing the proximity within these artworks. Pressing so close to the surface glass of the screen, the prism container which has become the stage for the performance of these images, that our breath has fogged up the glass. Here I pose and separate the different strands of action that all fold together to make an intimate moment of viewing a piece of work, to lay them out one at a time to promote the awareness of each strand: Holding, Measuring, Viewing, Wanting.Making the careful delineation to give you a lens to look through, to unveil the layers to the microscopic landscapes and political and personal complexities of words of touch and holding which spiral out from both the touch of space and The container, contained… and in-between, which can be found on either side of the border I aim to create. The of and the and are utilized to create a hover space between, a pause of breath, and here similarly this piece of text is the hover space to move into and through (Bennett 2020).
Holding Ursula Le Guin in her seminal essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction poses that the bag, the inanimate human necessity of holding was the first tool created by Man, that before we needed to capture, to pierce, to cut, there was a need for collection. Stating that the stomach, the primary container, was the first consideration, the holding, inspired us to seek external stomachs to collect, in readiness for future moments.
“The holder. The recipient.” Le Guin, by adding in this word repositions the frame entirely, pulling us outwards, to consider, not the action, nor the object, by who or what is in receipt of the holding. In this she is embedding a reminder of impact, of consequence, of the multifaceted nature of experience and exchange – the finite and absolute nature of two-sided experiences. To hold is to have at least two points as one, even briefly. Delineating with your cupped hands and plastic sides the material and the moment. Material here is the conduit for the recipient matter of light, of space, of air, of water, the element in receipt of your action. Within these works the containment is coming through two-dimensionally. The caught moment of the contained action. The tactile sensation acting on a visual level – to move the visceral point of material expanding and contracting in the result of pressure is fed, through the visceral exchange in the moment, through the camera, filters onto a screen reconstituted into a permeating skin of light – feeding back into us – we the container – are now experiencing the pressure optically – The object occupying the space of image.
Measuring The body acts as a ruler, as actant, to understand and measure authenticity and functionality in relation to itself and the wider perimeter.
This is something we as humans have always done. Traditionally in order to understand the incomprehensible humans instinctively bring the body up as a measure. Describing the network of the internet to be nodes and synapses, transmitting, the internet as a brain. The brain in turn becomes synonymous with the computer, as the measuring works backwards as forwards. Daily pieces of language weaving the technological into the biological. Simulation becomes an anchor. The first extensions of digital simulation centred around the translation of the physical and biological experiences of daily communication, simulating this through new digital tools. Here within these bodies of work both artists use a box as the formal component within the action of confinement, to construct their material parameters. Separately creating a tactile simulation of the digital experience to be further translated and occupy a digital space. This forms a responsive inversion of the usual tactile to digital translation, and shows a different position through which to experience. By approaching this from the other side we come down to the intangible at an intimate level. Down on our knees, fogging up the edges, feeling as if by moving we will rearrange the weight. The very nature of presence and intimacy of material being acknowledged and altered is brought across the mediums. The eye is put into the position of witnessing the haptic, to witness and experience rather than to construct a simulation. Because it is not a simulation of either side of the experience, it dances on the surface, as a new inherent nature of suspending the space around a haptic action into something imperceptibly inauthentic in its medium position.
Viewing Surface tension, in every way as the images warp and bend, occupy the delicate lip of screen. Behind glass, refracted in the experience of body pressed on one side, material pressed on the other, they are both the catalyst for the artwork, both the voyeur of the other, a deep intimacy in both occupying the surface. The paradigm created in order to feel this intimate moment, I believe stems from the lack of simulation. Using materials as a language through which to sense, preserve, cast the negative space around the intangible yet visceral feeling of space itself. Hands up – holding what was found, caught on a fingernail. Each element of this experience, defined in words, has a counterpart which coexists to create both sides, the one needed for the other, keeping both in balance. Purpose only existing with the purposeless. Containment only existing in relation to a continuous point of collapse, what makes something contained is that it has not yet collapsed but exists in relation to the possibility. What allows something to be held is that it will be let go, that once it was uncaught, and will again be tangled. What creates space is the density of experience weight and the pressure of objects. What creates confinement is the feeling of freedom. The understanding of any of these experiences or states is in the liminality, that we in language and sensation need to stand in between both states at all times – to describe all aspects intensely to remind ourselves that we are moving between inevitabilities and eventualities. Between the internal and the external – the body is both at once. The internal and external is held directly in front of us, as we osculate between the two.
So the room, the body, the screen, are containers, sitting inside one another. The medium, these words occupy right now are going through the exact same pulsation, and the intimate position of viewer is felt again. These works show a haptic knowing and exploration of the digital material experience. Materials acting as boundary to show to the confinements of digital sensory perception. Wanting Simulation of visceral experience tends to deflect, or in some way allows the mediator, the viewer, to engage oneself in the act of looking without perceiving the practicality of the limits, the walls and floor of where they’re standing, how they got there. These things matter. These things influence who it is you’ve come to look at and what you want. The viewer’s body, the act of voyeur always in a position of wanting. Wanting is an intimate action, we want an experience of an artwork, we need the sensation of a moment, craning low, inwards to the underside of a piece of work. These pieces give you this without the simulation. Tipping up the mirror and seeking the reflection of the gridded medium flicker. Part of the wanting that comes with viewing an artwork is the longing to come into contact and be held in an aurafound within, of, and around an artwork, it is described by the man who gave us this term as “its presence in time and space” (Benjamin 1969). Understanding the presence, and extended situation or location of an object is something and is often what gives us a connection, a point of contact to enter the work. It forms the base legibility for an experience. Within the experiences of these works the sensation of viewing digitally is opened up alongside the skin of its medium. We are shown that there is another side to seeking the tangible.
the touch of space
intangible
elusive
a fragile border between here
and
there
the air between your fingers
clay is shaped into bowl
but it is the emptiness that holds
frames build walls
but it is in the emptiness that we live
The touch of space explores the materiality/immateriality of space through photographic image and text. Space is fluid, forever shifting in our perception. Invisible lines tether space, simultaneously appearing, disappearing, and defining. It is through these intangible touches of the threads of space that we navigate the world.
enter the space - warily with the body and attempt to perform work
become texture and colour; a mask
suggestions
folds , rolls, mounds and bones can't exist here
a form
treated as material and expected to perform as object
accumulated and broken down, stretched and manipulated the (repurposed) body is erased
transformed, warped and layered
loosing and gathering fragments of identity as it goes ^pixels
Surface Occupation, Between the self and the process, is a natural series of exchanges, which result in a work formed out of moments. This work can be seen as a series of digital installations seeking the sensation of touch across a virtual medium.
I hope to seek the false intimacies that come through digital touch, the space where the work and the body collide, and utilize this threshold to situate these new bodies of work. The parameters are set as the maker relates to the synthetic body, now occupying a digital screen. The works are now imposed to exist only on a digital plane, participating in a touch test, through digital manipulation the bodies are reduced, and felt,
and by feeling formed
Utilizing a digital hand to generate sculptural works, tools of digital manipulation disintegrate and de-construct the sculptural objects. The maker’s hand impacts their material form through digital means, attempting to have an organic sensation of touch across a virtual medium.
Moments of tension are created by the artist’s; my, hand, tensions of tendons and flesh bending and breaking, as skin is stretched and impacted. Central to the process is the impression of tension, the push - pull of pixels in response to movement, which gives the sensation of pressure and impact, the digital body is responsive in its alterations. Push and pull, as the hand, I, grows accustomed, to this new medium interface. This sculptural process is seen as a way to unpack the sensation of touch across a virtual medium as a sculptor, seeking a way of activating and facilitating change through a digital sensation which would push the aging and altering processes of the synthetic body further. This research process is rooted in the idea that sculptural work is activated by the consumer’s body, that text exists in the liminal and is the simplest form to mediate experience, tactile and/or digital. Text is the loose thing, unbound it can evoke and articulate experience and medium, the simplest way to activate or construct the sensation, is that the work exists in the moment of exchange between the two; text and image combined construct the sensation of the work itself.
Surface Occupation is a question: Can I, the hand, feel a haptic exchange with my materials through the medium and material language of the screen? The action of push and pull becomes the full narrative of this action as I try to experience my hand moving across the surface of the track pad and impacting the objects, carving, extracting, enforcing action into their form. This action has become a catharsis, a method of drawing back and recomposing through taking away matter rather than growing matter anew . It occurs to me that I am seeking the sensorial in this moment, and I reconcile that I am having a tactile experience, as direct impact forms direct change, and body reacts to body. But it does not satisfy, nor complete the form of encounter we collectively as artists, makers, people that have their hands outstretched for collective and visceral experience, this constructed process does not often offer what we seek.
I realize through these actions, through my affect as body, and my attempt to exchange directly in the medium that it is the external and the incidental elements which complete the haptic moments we seek, the breath on surface, the scent, the cast of shadow or booming voice that cuts across experience. There is nothing incidental in this space of the digital page, nothing which marks the objects, alters their states, or cuts across their intention. It is in this lack of external coincidence, and the lack of this rhythm of happenstance and interception that begins to leave an unsatisfactory mark on my slow process of settling the form of sculptural into its new digital confines. I am left confused, the impact, its effect on the surface and nature of the bodies has given me the illusory feeling of body. But unfortunately, seeking exchange which affects within this digital stage feels inevitably unbalanced by the singular nature of each page. Each moment framed within a screen is restricted to the parameters of the rectangle, no intermeshing, no transparent layers that can be placed in dialogue with one another.
Intimacy is a contact – a touch point – of human communication experienced through the collective brain of the body, the organs, skins, all collectively holding/having responses. The public or collective body has been wrapped continuously in layers of distance as we falsify proximity, and I position myself now to a singular active moment between myself and the material of the screen which hosts the body of my work. The false of intimacy of the digital space has grown palpable, we are starved for the incidental brush, the affect of object on object or a noise which sits loosely in relation to an installation. The accidental becomes a necessary component for the object to take on agency in their own right, living externally to the body of the maker. We are pulled apart by the architecture of the page, we are unified in our lack of grasp.
biological body transmuted to the digital transformed and consumed
held in the vacuous digital ether
body rendered weightless
pixels stretching over form
feeding on skin
expelling seeping staining vacant cells
slowly dematerialising in static motion
layers
layering
layered
resting one over the other
planes overlapping subtly revealing and concealing
inhaling colour exhaling light
at ease here
Made between March and July 2020, Skies/Ledges consisted of paintings concerned with ideas of openness against, and within, restriction. Spending large amounts of time in the confines of a certain radius allowed for a mindful absorption – a breathing in – of my surrounding environment. There was a sense of freedom that came with these limitations – a kind of novelty of existing while time became immaterial; something to lose grasp of. In the paintings themselves, vast horizons are paired with windowed frames; there are piecemeals of other places to peer over, meditations on shape, stillings of colour and light. Within my practice, I’ve always been fascinated by the poetic condition of windows, how they are spaces that communicate both intimacy and distance – often simultaneously. Revisiting, re-positioning, and presenting Skies/Ledges in this digital, intangible realm allowed for a different sense of freedom to occur; to explore possibilities within the confines of multiple windows; first the image, then the page, then the screen. These windows became sites of transformation, where the sensuality of light and space was given room to breathe, just a little more.
We’re trapped with the things by Alicia Clooney The body, our own body is the site of the lived experience. The space/place in which we operate regardless of location, it is here that we touch, feel, move, hurt, strengthen and weaken. Its borders; the skin, the tips of our fingers and the length of our limbs, expand out in front of us and feel the way towards the horizon of experience - adjusting incrementally with age and affliction. Then we go inwards, towards the interior that works automatically; a thick pulse in the neck and a great expansion as we draw air into the lungs. We are perpetually in motion. But in a moment of stillness, we observe a landscape, a wall, an object. There are things that surround us, points of focus that can be a life-time obsession or a passing glance, catching the blinking eye and holding the body. The things have borders too, a fixed point of beginning and ending, more solid than ourselves. They occupy space, sometimes creating it with expanding horizons, interiors and exteriors. As we walk towards them, around them, or operate within them, we take moments to pause and consider the potential blurring of boundaries. As we share space and time with the things (lately for far longer than we would like), we see them degrade, grow, age or remain in ways our bodies, perpetually in motion, cannot. Yet despite these distinct separations of life cycle between us/them, subject/object, bodies/things we continue to bring ourselves closer, to cross these dividing lines, and particularly through language draw an uncanny sense of the lived experience from the things; A hot water bottle - warmth - a life force excreted and absorbed Rolling fields - a silence that can penetrate An empty bag - forgetting its duty - stagnant and negligent Institutions - holding then forgetting
These are some of the experiences described by the artists in this publication as we consider what it is to be confined. They draw awareness to a type of confinement or entrapment, that does not necessarily come from a physical restraint but from a set of relations in which a body, through proximity, begins to intertwine its parameters of existence with the things. These examples establish moments in which the boundaries have been blurred. A once breathtaking landscape brings an acute awareness of being inside. A woman treated as object; a reminder of the challenged yet continuously ascribed function of vessel to the female. The things have the unconscious power to hold us with them. We share their physical space and time and as we blink and breathe, the things adjust with time according to their own laws, they grow and decay and continue on a path that we cannot walk. Yet we are still held, confined to one trajectory that has been constructed through our own language, objects become us and we become objects, no longer divided, just things dually occupying space. Through the meanings we ascribe and the understandings we creatively yet presumptuously draw, we place our bodies here, giving our borders - our ever shifting horizons fixed points of beginning and ending. The things, and the spaces we share with them, are reminders of our unnatural moments of stillness; a brief or prolonged moment trapped and forgetting that we are perpetually in motion.
Conclusive Thoughts As the artists, writers, designers and now readers we have moved through these pages and witnessed eleven responses to the idea of confinement, created and experienced through the digital. Individual bodies of work acknowledge the physical, psychological and creative consequences of entrapment, isolation and limitation. The work is varied; in medium, in tone, in narrative and in subject matter but is situated side by side in the non physical site, tentatively termed as collective space. The artists share a kind of proximity, through the curated strands of thought running through the pages and operating under an umbrella term of confinement, however the works actual closeness, it’s ability to interact and inhabit together, remains difficult to articulate, perhaps even difficult to experience. We must question is a collective engagement with a brief enough to term it is a collective response and furthermore, can it be termed a collective site? Through comparisons and attempted articulations of this process, can the site itself begin to take shape in the mind of both the makers and now, here, the readers? Returning to the etymology of the title phrase (1) , we have sought to position the participants of the publication collectively together thoroughly occupying the territory and border space of the page. Utilizing the term and form of the word as architectural framing, as housing for collective experimentation with both the parameters of the medium and the phrase.. The members entering into a collective awareness and questioning towards confinement pushes the idea itself to the limits, breaking past its etymological borders the term cannot quite stretch and is burst by the dichotomy of collective action considering the restrictive, in this we have created a useful collective space, but as the term cannot hold us, we now occupy the physicality of this digital page. (1) Etymology Con (Latin) meaning with, thoroughly, together. Finis/Fines (Latin) meaning end, limit, border, territory (plural)
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'Digital’ has been a vital word in the conception, production, and distribution of this publication, and perhaps is vital to remember as we attempt to put words to it’s experience. The digital brings with it ideas of accessibility – a possibility to move without limitations of the physical. Each response to the term, becomes an imposed structure in the otherwise infinitely expanding space of the digital as it carves out its niche of understanding on these pages. As each new voice is seen and heard, we get closer to a collective definition of the word; lines begin to cross and intersect as we find overlapping sympathies. The term confinement specifically in relation to digital pages and the physicality of the viewing/perceiving experience, we have realized, has become a form and action of relinquishing control. Restricted by the controlled position of the body, and the control that has to be given over from the artists grip. Unable to turn your own head, to step inwards, to move your body to align with an objects shadow, the viewing and the multitudes of configuration and experience, are limited, confined by the singularity of each viewing experience. Each page, however overlapped in the collective experience of the artists, is singular in visual parameters of the page. Within the restriction of this medium we cannot authentically intercept one another. The accident of the collective experience, the chain of incidental happenings, the chance falling of light which brings a work to life, or the alignment of an object in relation to a body, or even the space to see where the viewer’s body lingers in a room. The incidental and accidental are crucial to cultivating genuine communal exchange, and here we move towards this, we push at the limitations of this singular focused device, seeking a more networked or rhizomic perspective and artworks that the body may weave through.
The antithesis of confinement in many ways is the collective experience that we seek, intending to gather individual experiences and position them into a communal space which allows for response, interaction, hoping to facilitate some of the overlap and yet narrowly we occupy our parameters, unable to breach the negative space at the turn of each page, not brushing of one another in the carless proximity required for accidents to happen. And yet we thoroughly, together, enter and occupy this limit, this end space, and by that enact its very meaning. Seeking self aware action towards the digital as medium.