Honor Freeman installing her powerswitch in Valparaiso
We often measure our lives by the big events, but it's the smaller moments that are a foundation and constant rhythm in our everyday. The humble objects, gestures and mundane activities are like small markers silently measuring the hours and marking the days. The flick of a switch, an unconscious action buried in familiarity. The on/off/on series are small markers, traces left behind in the urban landscape. Through the placement of these objects in foreign spaces and unfamiliar environments our habitual actions and interactions are highlighted.
Being a craft practitioner, my work has a strong relationship with processes and material knowledge. The making processes require a series of carefully choreographed and rehearsed movements and actions and a refining of these actions to develop a rhythm. In the private space of the studio this repetition offers a sense of structure to the day, it quiets the mind and informs the work. This is a very different set of experiences and processes from installing works in the public urban landscape.
The porcelain light switches and power points are produced using the method of slip casting. It is a process of preference for its immediacy and repeat production. There is always the thrill of the first cast from a new mould and the transformation from one material to another, from the coldness of plastic to the warmth of porcelain. The porcelain cast from the mould becomes a ghost, the essence of an object. It is this curious and remarkable ability of porcelain to mimic other surfaces, textures and objects. At the same time the porcelain retains the very qualities that make it such a seductive material, it imbues the object with some kind of otherness, transforming it and shifting it ever so slightly and subtly.
When an invitation was extended for an evening's stencilling excursion in Adelaide the porcelain light switches and power points were dusted off. The work had remained unfinished, waiting for a final process to complete it. Armed with a tube of liquid nails and a collection of the porcelain switches, the pieces were installed quietly around the streets. The physical process of exploring the streets in the early hours of the morning searching for locations to place the work is a process full of playfulness—an adrenalin rush, and a sharp contrast to a measured and rhythmic day in the studio. There is a duality in the process of making and placing the work, the process and craft extending beyond the studio. The fragility and preciousness frequently connected with the material gives way during the action of placing these familiar objects into public spaces. The anonymity involved in the action requires a letting go, allowing a certain detachment from the work.
The switches remained. Despite the city council cleanups, their banal quietness slipped under the radar. The urban streetscape offered an alternative space to unexpectedly encounter the intimate and quiet gifts—like a wink to those who notice the tiny details. The intimate nature of the objects is similar to the functional production pieces essential to my practice, inviting touch for the sake of touch. They are a gentle reminder of our physical environment, of our movements and interactions within it.
Thoughts of the simple action of flicking a switch, how many times do we perform that minute task each day? That precise moment before, and the potential of what that action promises—a power source leading to somewhere, maybe nowhere, but promising something. In an unfamiliar space the search for the location of the light switch as your hand slides along the wall, the body a personal measuring device locating the switch somewhere between hip and shoulder height.
There is a pleasant surprise and unanticipated feel of porcelain under fingertips, a subtle shift in the response of an object to touch. The expected flick and the sound of the click—click, flick, click, click. The porcelain unusually quiet to the touch, making a silent noise. Recalling the action of teetering the light between off and on and the sound that energy or electricity might make. (There is a relationship of sound to the action of putting the pieces up in the still and quiet of the night).
The gentle and quiet gestures this work was in Australia, was transformed in Chile. Wandering the unfamiliar streets of Santiago and Valparaiso, the anonymous placement of the small porcelain light switches and power points became a more symbolic gesture. I had no idea how these might be received or interpreted, being a familiar object in a foreign land, but a symbolic gesture nonetheless. Whilst walking the steep descent through the winding maze of dead end streets and alleys of Valparaiso to the Pacific Ocean searching for locations to place the pieces, the process changed in the light of the afternoon. I found myself looking with different eyes in the daylight, not the pair I regularly use. These had a sharper focus for the things that often go by unnoticed. The placement of the works was more considered, in locations where a switch of power had occurred. In Australia, I had been installing them in familiar locations where I knew the social and political dynamics, but in a foreign country, you really don't know, you can only guess. It had previously been about the unconscious actions that are a continuous rhythm throughout the everyday, commemorating the tiny tasks. And whilst the physical action of placing small banal objects around the streets is a gentle one, the banal object became a metaphor for the switch in power that was a part of Chile's story.
Note
Honor Freeman was in Santiago for the South Project gathering in October 2006 and as an exhibitor in Make the Common Precious.
