Dust Passing
Words by Louisa Elderton / Photos by Lydia Hartshorne
Dust is the matter of controversy: banned from the museum space for mortal fear of contamination, abhorred by any self respecting domestic god/ goddess (which I’m sure Nigella Lawson’s cleaner would testify to), and successfully sending asthmatics aghast near and far. And yet, the magical and timeless appeal of dust has mesmerised artists and academics through the ages. Cabinet Magazine recently dedicated a whole issue to the theme of dust, and in 2008, Riflemaker Gallery exhibited the work of American artist Liliane Lijn, where Aerogel, used by the NASA Stardust Project to collect interstellar dust (particles of comets and burned out stars), was presented in a glowing large-scale installation. For Amanda Couch - an exciting talent emerging on the London art scene - dust becomes a vehicle for a meditation on and merging of mind and body, light and grain, audience and performer, time and matter, past and present.
Dust Passing is a sculptural creation with two parts that work in dialogue: one, a live durational performative element, and the other, a camera obscura image that slowly materialises over time. The work was inspired by Man Ray’s Dust Breeding, a long exposure photograph of dust settling on Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By her Bachelor’s, Even. Its first incarnation was in October 2008, where Couch exhibited Dust Falling in the basement of Shoreditch town hall as part of in Flora Fairbairn’s Heart of Glass exhibition. This work then evolved into Dust Passing, as the photographic element that originally informed the work was reincorporated.
The artist lies bare under a landscape of dust that has been laid in a suspended sieve-like construction. As this is agitated, the landscape of dust up above cascades down below, both merging and dissolving with the artist’s body, forming a veil of matter that slowly deepens. The dust is a combination of ash (collected from her father’s fire), powdered sugar, flour, and ground herbs, coffee, tea, and lentils. Food nurtures life and vibrancy, ash conjures images of cremation; life cycles merge as dust. The use of ground lentils in the dust specifically connects to the photographic element in the work. The word lens derives from the Latin word meaning lentil, and was utilised by seventeenth century opticians due to their corresponding bi-convex shapes. Couch originally wanted to grind her own objects, in the vein of Michael Landy, revealing their essence and subsequently merging these with her very being. However, the toxicity of this process prevented its realisation.
As the performative element unfolds, an image is slowly developing in an adjacent blackened room. You enter through a separate door. Darkness envelopes you, and as sight is stripped, you tenderly feel your way along a wall into a vacuous space. Disorientation subsides, and a tiny pinhole of light reveals itself. Your eyes slowly adjust, and a suspended frame comes into view, upon which an obscure and yet familiar image intensifies. The body appears still, ethereal, calm, serene, enchanting; the image is inverted. She is luminous, delicate and beautiful and yet physically strong and powerful. The image is not fixed, but organic and alive. The dark figures of the audience visibly move in the background, like ghosts leaving their mark on time. This camera obscura element narrates both the physical and visceral elements of the live performance. Couch dreams of creating an anti-photograph, something reminiscent of Sugimoto’s Theatre series where the resulting photograph depicts a white imageless void.
Graduating from an MA in printmaking at the RCA in 2005, Couch honed ideas of investigation into identity and self. Her work becomes a form of self-portraiture. She feels she has created a character: “She lies in wait to watch magic flirt with the physical, drawn in by the sensual and sexual side of materials. Sometimes she works in front of a camera. But I don’t think she knows that she is being watched”. We see the emersion of this character in Dust Passing. The audience feels they have stumbled upon a timeless wonder that has always existed; a dirty snow globe of magical matter fuses with light to present particles that defy definition, connecting past, present and future.
Couch was influenced by Celeste Olalquiaga who says in The Artificial Kingdom that “Dust is what connects the dreams of yesteryear with the touch of nowadays…a powdery cloud that rises abruptly and then begins falling on things, gently covering their bright, polished surfaces”. Couch tells me that “in my photograph, I wanted to prevent this downward journey and keep [dust] in the air, [then] the possibilities are endless, but as they fall and land, there is no turning back…things enter in the past, a place from which they cannot return”. This presentation of time as a non-linear realm of osmosis, to be travelled and explored, is conceptually beautiful, and in a sense defies death. Art and photography become a means of transformation, forcing physical, mental and ethereal boundaries to blur so that artist and audience become merged in a way that is quite unique.
Dust Passing has been selected as part of the National Platform at SPILL Festival of Performance on Saturday 18th April and Sunday 19th April. Tickets are free. To reserve please go to: http://www.spillfestival.com
Posted Mon, April 06, 2009