Roles: artist, curator and organiser.
PALP (Penwith Artist-Led Projects) is a collective of artists aiming to re-establish West Cornwall as a locus of progressive and experimental artistic activity. ‘PALPitations’, the group’s second site specific show, took place on the ground floor of the otherwise disused BT exchange building in Penzance over the last weekend of February.
The space is vast and still haunted by its past; remnants of its former usage proliferate, providing a loaded context so markedly different from the attempted neutrality of the art gallery. Here the signs of an industrial past, intimately linked with ideas of communication, comprehension and exchange, are the springboard and inspiration for this event. A relationship of mutual dependence is enjoyed: the building and its history prompts, sustains, and layers the meanings of these installations, and the installations serve to reinvigorate and revitalize the dilapidated space, injecting it with renewed purpose.
A sense of vitality and humour is introduced early on in the exhibition with Tessa Garland’s Aquarium . The viewer passes a fish tank at the back of which a small camera is installed. Seen through this aquatic environment, the various intrigued reactions of viewers are projected on a large screen in the next room. Having already entered the work, we are then afforded the luxury of watching others, similarly unknowing, loom foolishly into vision to join the fish and the bubbles. Playing with notions of spectatorship and the viewer’s role in completing the work of art, as well as providing numerous giggles, Garland ’s piece augurs a fresh and witty ambience.
In the dwarfing, open, industrial main exhibition space, the installations and constructions are more firmly rooted, both thematically and aesthetically, to their context. Both ideas related to and mechanisms of communication dominate: from voicemail to cans on a string, and from transatlantic cables rescued from the seabed to snake-like concrete tongues writhing out of an old GPO crate.
In Anagram , Carole Dodds uses anagrams of the name Alexander Graham Bell to provide bizarre and nonsensical subject matter for a series of images resembling primitive digital drawings. Although visually unexciting, this series stands as a witty new method for the generation of imagery in a way that still relates to the exhibition context. In the three-part work Cable , Marion Taylor employs the physical vehicles of communication: huge bundles of wires, cable from the ship that laid the transatlantic cable off Porthcurno, and a piece of such cable retrieved from the seabed. These elements are arranged monumentally, occupying a large amount of space and using that space to suggest undulation, conveyance, connection and dislocation.
It is in two dark rooms at the back of the building that the potential of this evocative context is most successfully activated. In Dead Silence by Amanda Lorens, five monitors showing videos of human mouths are set on plinths and covered by draped white sheets. Although the mouths appear to be talking, nothing can be heard. The room is dark, lit only by the filtered light of the veiled screens. The pervading quality is a feeling of absence; a ghostly and sombre poignancy issues from the distanced and dislocated human presences. Linked to the exchange building in the focus on the mouth and on speech, and pertaining to its history in the evocation of the activity that once invigorated this space, Lorens nevertheless transcends this specificity to address broader ideas and provoke deeper reactions. The viewer is moved to contemplate such concepts as transience, mortality, and the impossibility of true communication.
Louise Short’s Feeling Faint also utilises the moving image to evocative effect. Using several projectors, films of details of the room in which the piece is installed are imposed onto those details. For example, film shot of a stopped clock is projected onto that clock (and so with a screw, a clothes hanger, a bare corner). The projected images move with Short’s breath as she was shooting, never aligning with the reality from which they were taken, but rather always floating and hovering around it. There is no attempt to create new realities, only to highlight aspects and details, previously mundane and aesthetically undistinguished, to be perceived differently. This project has nothing to do with self-expression, nor politics per se, but rather is the result of meditation on the nature of this space, as well as on the perception of spaces in general. The hovering projections have the effect of layering reality, allowing poetic connections to seep between the layers.
Cohered by the physical space and industrial history of its context, this show was a fascinating event. Although not all the work shown was entirely convincing (some pieces lacked visual impact), the weaker elements were validated as part of an innovative and vigorous project. Seeking to re-engage with social spaces and re-integrate art and modern life, PALP is sure to make considerable impact on the largely commercial, gallery-based Cornish art scene.
The artists included in ‘PALPitations’ were Carolyn Black, Tessa Garland, Carole Dodds, Gillian Cooper, Sue Bleakley, Marion Taylor, Amanda Lorens, Louise Short, and Nick Harpley. The show ran from 23 rd -25 th February.
Ed Krcma, March 2001.