April 2019
Spur of the moment,
Found steel reinforcing mesh, steel cable.
The builder laughed, telling me “It’s not even mine. The guy next door dumped it, He didn’t want it, so he folded it up with a digger and pushed it onto my site. It’s all yours if you want it, but it’s bloody heavy.”
This process of spontaneous collection highlights the immediacy and potential found in the present moment. Set against the automatism of our daily lives, these moments provide space for indeterminacy or the ‘freedom to’ act out of character.1
Objects have the capacity to become other than what we know, this otherness, like our understanding of the self, calls into question singular established narratives.
Elizabeth Grosz in her essay Materialism, Feminism and Freedom explores the issue of matter being instilled with potential when she writes,“the spark of indetermination that made life possible spreads through matter by means of the activities that life performs on matter. As a result, the world itself comes to vibrate with its possibilities for being otherwise.”2
I am examining various levels of intervention and strategies of display in relation to found material, in order to consider how the two combine to generate meaning.
Mel Arnold 