three studies on presence in things
‘Three Studies on Presence in Things’
RCA Show One
MA Degree Show 2009
Royal College of Art, London
“Truth comes from opening up and laying bare: an unconcealing.
It does not matter if I destroy the coherence of the object.
Or am I simply shifting the appearance of cohesion when I take something apart?
I have to slip away in order to find the essence of myself.”
“Here I find myself again at the border between worlds: between inclusion and exclusion,
in the borderland of longing and loss. It is neither acceptance nor rejection, neither
proposition nor opposition. It is the only position where I am close and far enough
to see the make-up of either side. From here I draw away so that my eyes and ears
are open to possibility and ways through.”
“But neither our purpose nor we is real. In our search for home and meaning,
we are fated to return to the emptiness and forced to confront the only reality
we have, that of our in-between state.”
“The texture of society is like clay: having form but formless; malleable but
with limits; leaving the mark of the hand.”
“It is at that moment of acute risk and nakedness: when the lights illuminate,
eyes are on you, the microphone listens, the video records and a question
gets through the persona you are projecting. The question enters you and
blows clear a space. In that moment you are unravelled, undone. But in the
unravelling, a birthing happens and truth is revealed.”
“There is a hollowness in the centre of the colonial native. It seems that the
soft centre of our identities have been scooped out and then filled with shiny images
of a mythology. The flickering shadows in our core drives us to seek out the
home-shore where these shadows will step out of us and become real.”
” ‘How do I begin when I have come to a place of complete negation?’
I examine what is left and what is present when the noise of fantasy is removed.
I am left with nothing: a kind of exhalation.”
“Nothing is the ultimate destination of all striving. The achievement of nothing
brings us to a place where we are fully present. Nothing is where we can properly begin.”
“To confront the void is to confront the openness of death and to lose one’s form
in life. Rather than encountering death as cessation, death becomes the beginning
of transformation into a mode of existing that is open, moving and always beginning.”
“Conversations are such funny things. Each person is a throbbing concentration of
thoughts, emotions, intentions, and fears plugged into a series of words that fly about.”
“The question is not answered at all. The question is superseded because the I
who asked the question is no longer there. The way out that was sought requires
that the nature of the seeking be changed.”
