Charistmatic Things

Abstract

n his 1984 essay collection The Responsibility of Forms Roland Barthes refutes the notion of a blank surface writing “No surface, wherever we consider it, is a virgin surface: everything is always, already, rough, discontinuous, unequal, set in motion by some accident: there is the texture of the paper, then the stains, the hatchings, the tracery of strokes” (162). Here Barthes considers the nascent material (the substrate) of a work of art not as a neutral surface, but as a presence that is already lively and activated. The idiosyncratic precondition of material that Barthes describes is where much of my work begins: from a cast-off or remnant, severed from its value system, which forms the logic for a response. In my practice these leftover materials—removed from their original context, and laden with evidence of their past— are imbued with “thing-ness”. These residual surfaces, enlivened by their status of post-use, are re-metabolized in the studio in order to navigate within frameworks of natural and synthetic, consumption and waste, subject and object.