SPECIES OF SPACE
by Jim Colquhoun
“The series of signs multiplied itself into a series of signs of signs, of signs repeated an innumerable number of times, always the same and always in some ways different, for to the sign made on purpose was added the sign fallen there by chance.”
Italo Calvino ‘Cosmicomics’
“... to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.”
Georges Perec ‘Species of Space’
“Space and duration are one.”
Edgar Allan Poe ‘Eureka’
Hrafnhildur Halldórsdóttir approaches space with the intention of bending it, linking its disparate proportions, making it other than it is, transforming it. Particular spaces indicate the dimensions and the duration of the work to be done and it is partly due to this desire to let chance and circumstance dictate that it resembles a conjuration, a spell, a form of magical thinking wherein there resides a conscious desire to cause change in the world of things. Her art (all art?) can be viewed as a metonym for being in a world where the noumenal and the phenomenological abut each other, intermingling through the conscious intervention of the artist. Duration is a key component in this process, Halldorsdottir recognising that ‘time taken’ may move things beyond the limits of the physical into an arena where repetition itself becomes central. There is a chance that once the ‘ritual’ is inaugurated it may undermine the whole profane process of deadlines, opening nights and end points and just as with the proponents of magical thinking there is a danger that the artist may lose herself in the endlessly unfolding moment, causality reduced to nothing but a queasily myopic treadmill... What saves the work (and the artist) from becoming lost in process is the need to engage with the specifics of particular spaces, but also an engagement with materiality, in this instance a delicate substratum of threads, paint, felt and leather (amongst others) are teased into something resembling a rapprochement that nevertheless may fly apart at any time as the signs and the portents endlessly proliferate.
Jim Colquhoun 2012
