A House for Hermes #01: The House of My Father
Solo Exhibition
Location - Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Victoria, Australia
Date - 2006
Homelessness, displacement, exile, accelerated mobility, flux; all seem to define the contemporary condition. If routes really do proceed roots, if the overwhelming experience of contemporary life is one of fluidity, if we are all vulnerable strangers, what of the house? What constitutes home and place? Where are we to dwell? How are we to make our home in the world? How is place to be made?
These questions of home, house, dwelling and place are the basis of the A House for Hermes Project. A House for Hermes #01: The House of My Father recalls the many houses that my father lived in (from the tiny flat in Sydney where he was born, to the nursing home room where he lived the last year of his life) and gathers all their various spaces into one aggregated and re-membered house. A series of floor plans drawn from memory by my father, constitutes the initial conditions of this project. These re-collected plans, conceived as a kind of generative data-set, produce two divergent spatialisations of memory: one architectural, one topological.
These two spatialisations of memory, first digitally modelled, were then pursued through the materials of my father’s professional life, in particular his catalysis research archive. Using both digital and manual paper cutters, a series of contour and sectional forms in positive and negative modes, were cut into his research card index file. His experimental log books, and his father’s machine tools are deployed in this iteration of the work to re-arrange and ‘pose’ the forms.
It is through these combined digital and manual operations with their nuances of precision, delicacy, fragility and intimacy, which, together with propositional procedures of compression, interleaving, leaning, balancing, holding, and weighting, combine with the specificity of matter to enact memory rather than model it.
The artifacts in the exhibition can be thought of as process forms. These forms are not models of (some extant thing) nor are they models for (some future action). They may suggest these attributes by association or even assume them at some time after the event of their making, but they are primarily ‘the thing itself’.
A House for Hermes #01: The House of My Father, sought to configure time and the experience of time not as sealed categories of past, present, and future, of “strung out punctual presents”; but as a multiple entangled event, a smudging of becoming, a kind of chorus variously in and out of harmony and rhythm. In so doing the final work articulates a tectonics of place, but a tectonics of place configured not as a house or the erection of an architectural enclosure, but as a topography, indeed a topology of encounter which does not return us to the certain and the fixed, but instead inclines us towards the Other
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