Table Intelligentsia by Jennie Taylor

Table Intelligentsia Jennie Taylor

A text in response to: With Other Matter, part two Roscommon Arts Centre 1

Lorenzo Tonti, Contorted, Photographic archival pigment ink print on Hahnemuehle Photo Rag paper, 119cm x 89cm, 2020.

Table Intelligentsia Jennie Taylor

A text in response to: With Other Matter, part two: Lydia Hickey, Annabel Potterton, Laura Skehan, Ina Olohan, Amna Walayat, Conor O’Grady, Kate Mercer, Conor Wickham, Mark Beatty, Matthew Wilson, Stephen Maybury, Lorenzo Tonti, Jasmin Marker, David Pierce, Marielle MacLeman, Kate Oram & Blaine O’Donnell.

Cover image: Steven Maybury, From The Pavement to Eternity, C type print and sculptures. styrofoam, silicon carbide, spray paint and adhesive, 42.0 x 59.4 cm (print) and various sizes (sculptures), 2022.

Roscommon Arts Centre 15th July - 27th August 2022

Jennie Taylor

With Other Matter: part two

Her ventures in and out of rooms filled her days. In and out. Back and forth. Aside from occasional care and intake of fuel, she spent all of her time walking from room to room, stopping to stretch, think or dance. She paid close attention to things around her.

Her environment’s presence was enhanced, as was its impact.

She enjoyed her kitchen table’s availability and kept it sparse. Plates and conversations could bounce on and off of it and she appreciated how it remained unchanged despite the intensity of the activity it hosted.

Eventually, she circled and studied the kitchen table enough times to world and swirl her house.

Mark Beatty, I Can’t See The Paper For The Wood For The Trees (Infinity Drawing), paper and card, 15 x 230 x 180cm, Studio Shot West Cork Arts Centre, 2020.

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Jennie Taylor

She learnt to be still, a skill she acquired purely through repetitive behaviour and a stretch of time of repeated repeats in a sequence of repeats. Her stillness allowed her to lock her gaze wherever she and her gaze fancied. She had a solid trust in her whims.

This trust was as consistent as her daily activities. It materialised and became a fixed layer around her, like a bodily filter that operated as armour as much as a lens. It meant that whatever she happened upon, wherever she stalled, tripped, or stopped, the subject of her fixed gaze would present itself. For anyone who would observe her in these moments, she appeared as if she was focusing on nothing in particular and was simply staring into space. What she was actually doing was tirelessly active. She would think through her look; thinking into what she was looking at and produced new material realities from her mixture of thought, endurance, focus, interest, preoccupations and the properties of her subjects.

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With Other Matter: part two

During one of these highly productive and crucial events, the lines on the plywood surface of her kitchen table appeared clear, prominent and intelligent in a certain light, a light which captured her attention – now locked on the wooden surface. Its distorted concentric shapes inspired her to rethink the exterior structure of her house. She made drawings of its concave lines; oval visions became elongated versions of typical proportions. She populated her design with distinctive protrusions to indicate and support hives of activities such as her repeated stretches and dances. She accumulated her rubbish and unwanted matter to create a physical force to push outwards and shape corners and sections of the house. Organic waste was mixed with plastics and wrappers, acting as a surprisingly effective tool to bend and alter the existing structures. She pushed large quantities of the mixed waste against her interior walls until the walls and corners were swollen from the inside and made the house appear curved and stretched from the outside.

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Jennie Taylor

With Other Matter: part two

It looked like it had boils and infections, extra distorted shapes popped out here and there with no sense of preconceived architectural sensibility, but this new silhouette was a considered form. She had accurately located the parts of the house where she wished to stretch, breath into her legs during the day and dance into her favourite song on repeat in the evenings. She referenced curves found in Bindweed’s leaf structure, a shape she only knew through memory as she was too preoccupied with interior activity to go outside and tend to her garden. The bulges and protrusions could be as small as a single piece of pebbledash, extended outwards to cater for specific stretches in which she would spread her fingers and slot them into tailored tiny spaces while she took up space and assumed powerful poses.

Annabel Potterton, Conversation between artichokes and dockleaves, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm, 2021.

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This new form would make permanent a specific design for one body moving through space in a repetitive manner, guided by 11

Jennie Taylor

With Other Matter: part two

the intelligence of the lines in the wood of her kitchen table. It would harden what was truly temporary but felt permanent to her as she laboured over the movements, the stretches, the gazes, and her dances.

Her actions became matter. A physical record.

When she completed her renovation, she stepped outside for the first time in months. The house pulsated, gleamed and its awkward form showed up as a beauty known only to her. A beauty that was constant in all versions of weathered light.

As she examined the house, her body shattered and dropped into a neat pile on the driveway, ordered and angular, nothing like her luminous and lumpy vision.

Blaine O’Donnell, Bitumen Pool, limestone, sand, gravel, grey Portland cement, bitumen of Judea, water, wood, Size H12 x W22.5 x L31.5 cm, 2019.

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About Roscommon Arts Centre's Visual Art Writer In Residence

With Other Matter: part two

Jennie Taylor is the Roscommon Arts Centre’s Visual Art Writer in Residence for 2022. During this time Jennie is invited to write critical texts on selected exhibitions and projects happening across the county.

The intention of this residency is to allow writers to experiment with their writing style and explore new ways of disseminating their work.

The writings will be available at Roscommon Arts Centre and online as they are published.

Jennie Taylor is a fiction and arts writer. Her practice draws from particle physics, Agential Realism and micro-histories. Areas of concern include proximity, locality, contemporary pedagogies, theorising empirical knowledge, and fictioning art history. A graduate of Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology, in 2014 she completed her MA, Art in the Contemporary World, National College of Art & Design. She has published her work in Critical Bastards Magazine, The Stinging Fly and Visual Arts Newsletter. Jennie lives and works in Dublin, Ireland.

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