The Social Lives of Objects
Hialry Jack, Dallas Seiz and Lisa Penny at Castlefield Gallery
Esther Windsor
Hilary Jack, Lisa Penny and Dallas Seitz use lost, found and broken objects in sculpture, collage and photography to examine the moment objects loose their use, order and meaning. Hilary finds broken royal Dolton figurines, umbrellas or shoes and by mending, making good and returning makes a reparation and tribute to lost and broken objects: Dallas uses anthropological objects to represent and remake myths, including revisions, mistakes and stories. Lisa makes collaged, low relief sculptures, representing lost history and hopes, questioning pastiche and post modern borrowing, a feature of a strong trend for nostalgic and ‘retro’ styles in recent contemporary art.
All these objects are found in charity shops, eBay or from personal history and are often the detritus of life left behind, of death, divorce, loss of a home, family breakdown, moving from a family home to retirement or other institutionalisation, like prison, hospital or hostel. Encountering these objects can provoke anxiety of matter out of place and of people and objects not mended anymore but required to function in an ever changing and confusing order of things. It is not only royal Dolton touchingly mended here but coherence grappled with in a world of signs that have lost their signifiers
In these works it is not just objects recycled but concepts reworked. The artists’ emotional investment, the act of transformation, the imaginative entering into the life of objects, the story, the confusion and loss allowed a stage and place to be, this is what gives meaning to these objects that have become art.
When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to re appear, to make it comeback, because it’s lost space and there’s something in it…The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. (Andy Warhol: 1975:144)
It is the absence, the space the objects do not occupy or that they vacated that is crucial. These works are about the obsession with objects and the meaning that resides in them and the very careful reworking of layers of meaning. Lacanian psychoanalyst, Darian Leader, in his latest work on melancholia and mourning says that
In fantasy and dreams, narratives and stories are changed, revised, slowed down, and focused on in intense detail, to allow reordering of experience to resolve inner conflict. In mourning there is the desire to hold time still, to recapture the past and the loved one. Moments are relived. Photos and objects not let go. (Leader: 2008)
In his book, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression he says
The mourner must constitute his object by separating the empty place of the fundamentally lost object from the images of the people who go into it. But the melancholic is faced with a difficulty here for the precise reason that there is no difference for him between the object and the place it occupies. If mourning will not be allowed by early internalisation not of an object but of an objects absence, in melancholia the loss and the object are equated. (Leader: 2008)
Darian Leader points to examples from contemporary art of this melancholic transformation of an absence into something real and present: Bruce Naumans’ cast not of a table but empty space the table bounded; Rachel Whitereads’ casts of empty interiors of architectural interiors; Cornelia Parker engraving rings with the eleven days once lost from the English calendar. These practices share a concern with giving absence a physical presence, a negative space turned into something real and substantial. (Leader: 2008)
The works in The Social Life of Objects do something very similar by evoking what is abject, ugly, and uncomfortable in discarded objects and unifying the past meaning with present loss.
Hilary Jack most pointedly gives life and love to lost and abandoned objects, restoring them and most interestingly often returning them to where they became lost. A quiet sadness, dignified by compassion exists here and the possibility of failure after repair, tolerated. Broken Figurines repaired, shoes found at a bus stop mended (when its cheaper to buy new ones) polished and embossed with golden letters, trousers cleaned and pressed when they had been discarded in disgust in the road, a tennis racket repaired with macramé. The thought, the space occupied and vacated here is sophisticated and impressive, the more so for allowing successful reading in another cultural context, that of contemporay art in a public realm.
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Lisa Penny enters the place of simulacra, of collaged meanings and signs, with motifs and wood cut out shapes linking images, experience and emotion. Here the mourning is of lost rituals and rites of passage: family; work and home, which provide the individual with unity. The promises of the 60’s: homes, machines for living in; feminism, liberating women’s work and sexuality; civil rights giving access to opportunities; technology giving the freedom of time. Her disregard for a very established trend of ‘retro’ within contemporary art , can confuse momentarily, as this work may look ‘retro’ but close inspection shows attempts to ‘marry’ actual fractured social and psychological states within a made object. Sourced from 60’s and 70’s domestic supplements the collages and structures link figurative and abstract images, with titles like ‘Lone thoughts’ and ‘waiting for something to happen’. ‘No Space’ deals with concepts of personal and physical space, governed by state and idealistic architectural visions of the 60’s. There is a parody and mourning active in this work, at disappointed promises and experience emptied of meaning with only an image remaining.
Mark Cousins in looking at stories and fantasies of destruction in modernity said ‘behind the optimism of the enlightenment has fallen the shadow of a distinctly modern relation to destruction, one which defines a contemporary melancholy’. He proposes to oppose such melancholy as well as guarding against optimism. (Cousins: 2008: Architectural Association lectures) Lisa’s vulnerable wood and cork built structures, contain I think, a similar proposal.
Dallas Seitz’s representation of myth in his objects is perhaps most straightforward. Using objects found or retrieved from family history, they bravely and sometimes elegantly take ugly objects and make sculptures that are totemic of stories or myths often taken from popular culture or National Geographic. For example a model used to imitate the Loch ness monster. His sculptures look like and borrow from anthropology and folk art and refer often to elements of nature, dead animals and body parts for example. Very physical emotions are evoked, revulsion at false teeth, discomfortable nostalgia for a politically incorrect doll ( a voodoo princess from his grandmothers’ bathroom) a mermaid, a cannibal head found in a children’s hospital and recreated to be a hunter, a logman troll, from the myth of a woman so desperate for a child, she had a log child.
From Descartes mind body split to a late capitalist 21c world of intense materiality and signs with no signifiers: economic failure, social and personal depression, environmental concerns, beliefs of magical realism, hold in common a crisis in materiality. The need for there to be more than desire redirected to objects. Lack, uselessness waste must be reconstituted.
There should be supermarkets that sell things and supermarkets that buy things back, and until that equalizes, they’ll always be more waste than there should be. … People should be able to sell their old cans, their old chicken bones, their shampoo bottles, their old magazines. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. (Andy Warhol: 1975:145)
Mary Douglas, in her book Purity and Danger, makes an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo in classification, which, reinforced by rituals of purity and impurity, create unity in experience. By these means, symbolic patterns are worked out and publicly displayed. Within these patters disparate elements are related and disparate experience is given meaning.’ (Douglas:1966:3) The works in this exhibition deal with loss, waste, abject bodies and myths that challenge the rational. In their different ways the artists take these lost and found objects and constitute a transformation that reminds us the meaning and lives of objects are themselves lost and found, bound, as they are, by unconscious processes and that their absence is as powerful as their presence.
Esther Windsor is a writer and curator. She is currently studying for a practice based phD at kingston University. Projects include "Bad Girls" ICA 1994, curation of The Citibank Prize and catalogue 1992-4 and her writing for Creative Camera.
Hilary Jack Artist of the Month Axis
Text by Ele Carpenter
I’ve just started teaching on the MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths and it seemed a perfect opportunity to invite the emerging curators on the course to search through Axis to find out about artists across the UK; Karen MacDonald quickly selected the artist and curator Hilary Jack.
Jack separates out her roles as artist and curator but still maintains continuity in her practice through her interest in subtly critiquing our relationship with material objects. Jack reinvents the meaning of the object within everyday life and public space. Her work spans a range of artistic and curatorial strategies interrogating patterns of consumption and re-use. In partnership with Paul Harfleet Jack co-curates Apartment in Manchester, as well as major events such as Transpennine08.
Reflecting on ethical tensions between object and environment she considers the problem of over-consumption and our never ending need for more stuff. By making profound but seemingly incidental interventions in the world, Jack salvages moments of humour and theatricality through the process of repairing discarded objects. Her ongoing ‘Make do and Mend' (2006) series involves what she describes as ‘socially interactive research’, humbly repairing and cleaning found objects' and returning them to the site where they were left. One such example is 'Yellow Car' (2006), a toy car left abandoned which Jack 'pimped' for the Extreme Craft Exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius (2007). Today the object lives on virtually through photos on flickr and the artists’ blog.
As well as an artist, Jack is an articulate online writer and her blog-style Work in progress pages on Axis give an insight into the role of artist-run and curatorially-driven spaces presenting work at the Buy Art Fair in Manchester (2008). Her recent figurine works subvert or modify the original artefact problematising its social codes and status as an art object with results that are both amusing and uncanny.
As the financial crisis unfolds, artists such as Jack have a number of resources at their disposal - from performative and re-use based art practice - to critical curating in domestic and public space. Perhaps most interestingly much of her work has an online counterpart. Her participation in the Photographers Gallery Plastic Bag Exhibition (2007) where she submitted a series of photographs entitled 'Turquoise Bag in a Tree' (2007) and the earlier work 'Glove' (2006), have now become part of the urban mythologies surrounding facebook and flickr. It will be interesting to see how she might utilise these memes further in the future.2
Ele Carpenter is a curator, artist and researcher based in Newcastle
[1]. Karen MacDonald is currently studying for an MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London. Before this she worked for several years in arts administration, coordination and arts development for organisations including Bath Area Network for Artists and NESA (North East Somerset Arts). Independent and self initiated projects have included coordination for Fringe Arts Bath Festival and peripatetic curatorial project South Central. She is currently working part time for Filmpro, an organisation that works with artists from marginalised groups who use digital media.
[2]. The term meme is used to describe the transmission and evolution of information. In this case specifically information transmitted via the internet, often utilising the most recent technology. An meme may stay the same or may evolve over time, by chance or through commentary, imitations, and parody versions, or even by collecting news accounts about itself.
Hilary Jack's artist profile
Hilary Jack's curator profile
Ele Carpenter's curator profile
Work in progress - Hilary Jack
www.apartmentmanchester.blogspot.com
www.photonet.org.uk
April 2009
The In Betweeness of Things:
Hilary Jack at Transition Gallery for E8, The Heart of Hackney
Amanda Ravetz
A pair of leather shoes on a bus stop bench, a torn football by a bin, a wooden tennis racquet propped against the wall. Jack’s matter-of-fact images evoke the journeys objects take towards obsolescence, suggesting an easy-come, easy-go attitude to mass-produced goods. And yet a melancholy hangs over these discarded bits of lives, evocative of human loss and of how the shedding of things leaves us strangely diminished. Once they are broken, we can no longer take them for granted; they disturb and unsettle us.
Jack not only photographs discarded and lost objects, she brings them back from the brink. The leather shoes have been repaired, polished and embossed with golden words. The football re-stitched and inflated. The racquet has been made fit for a new purpose, migrating from the street to the gallery.
At a time when local authorities in the UK are making the recycling of household waste compulsory, this work has a particular resonance. Local government websites explain the (complicated) arrangements residents must follow in sorting their waste into colour-coded boxes. They list the collection times, the types of vehicle and equipment that will remove the bottles, plastic and tins. Turning attention to more idiosyncratic items, Jack’s work also references the excesses of an economy based on built-in-obsolescence. And yet the very bathos of her gestures provokes the thought that recycling itself may be a futile action in the face of so much consumption and waste.
Indeed it is through the possibility of failure—the futility of the repairs carried out, the possibility that the replaced objects will not survive—that Jack’s work lodges its appeal. There is no guarantee that the things that have been cleaned or repaired and returned to the places where they were found will re-enter the social worlds they left. And so, cut adrift from their pasts, their futures uncertain, their very in-betweeness invites curiosity about their trajectories—and about other inanimate things.
Running through avant-garde theory is a strong belief in the purposelessness of art. The power of the aesthetic encounter lies in its freedom from instrumentality, evoking in turn a future free of human self-interest. By taking the everyday into the social world of art, the relationships surrounding objects are gently re-aligned, their purposes changed. Jack’s work causes utilitarian items to reveal a side of themselves beyond their practical usefulness, their original journeys, or the contexts of their use and abuse. The emblems of sociality that Jack adds in the forms of inscriptions, the other subtle interventions she makes, draw these ordinary objects into another aesthetic domain, and in so doing, insert a tiny pause between purpose and purposelessness.
When the door-closer ‘goes on strike’, says anthropologist Bruno Latour, we momentarily acknowledge its agency in our world. We speak bitter words when things let us down, investing the things around us with expectations, memory, frustration, hope. Objects are not human, but they are part of our social world.
At the heart of Hilary Jack’s work is a commitment to ‘the social life of things’. Her gathering and rehabilitation of lost or abandoned objects are less acts of altruism than statements of fact. Holding open the possibility that objects are (non-human) people, treating them as interlocutors, the artist momentarily defies the incommensurability between our world and theirs.
Dr. Amanda Ravetz is an AHRC Fellow at MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University where she is currently pursuing research into ‘Contemporary Convergence of Aesthetics and Ethnography'.
Hialry Jack, Dallas Seiz and Lisa Penny at Castlefield Gallery
Esther Windsor
Hilary Jack, Lisa Penny and Dallas Seitz use lost, found and broken objects in sculpture, collage and photography to examine the moment objects loose their use, order and meaning. Hilary finds broken royal Dolton figurines, umbrellas or shoes and by mending, making good and returning makes a reparation and tribute to lost and broken objects: Dallas uses anthropological objects to represent and remake myths, including revisions, mistakes and stories. Lisa makes collaged, low relief sculptures, representing lost history and hopes, questioning pastiche and post modern borrowing, a feature of a strong trend for nostalgic and ‘retro’ styles in recent contemporary art.
All these objects are found in charity shops, eBay or from personal history and are often the detritus of life left behind, of death, divorce, loss of a home, family breakdown, moving from a family home to retirement or other institutionalisation, like prison, hospital or hostel. Encountering these objects can provoke anxiety of matter out of place and of people and objects not mended anymore but required to function in an ever changing and confusing order of things. It is not only royal Dolton touchingly mended here but coherence grappled with in a world of signs that have lost their signifiers
In these works it is not just objects recycled but concepts reworked. The artists’ emotional investment, the act of transformation, the imaginative entering into the life of objects, the story, the confusion and loss allowed a stage and place to be, this is what gives meaning to these objects that have become art.
When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to re appear, to make it comeback, because it’s lost space and there’s something in it…The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. (Andy Warhol: 1975:144)
It is the absence, the space the objects do not occupy or that they vacated that is crucial. These works are about the obsession with objects and the meaning that resides in them and the very careful reworking of layers of meaning. Lacanian psychoanalyst, Darian Leader, in his latest work on melancholia and mourning says that
In fantasy and dreams, narratives and stories are changed, revised, slowed down, and focused on in intense detail, to allow reordering of experience to resolve inner conflict. In mourning there is the desire to hold time still, to recapture the past and the loved one. Moments are relived. Photos and objects not let go. (Leader: 2008)
In his book, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression he says
The mourner must constitute his object by separating the empty place of the fundamentally lost object from the images of the people who go into it. But the melancholic is faced with a difficulty here for the precise reason that there is no difference for him between the object and the place it occupies. If mourning will not be allowed by early internalisation not of an object but of an objects absence, in melancholia the loss and the object are equated. (Leader: 2008)
Darian Leader points to examples from contemporary art of this melancholic transformation of an absence into something real and present: Bruce Naumans’ cast not of a table but empty space the table bounded; Rachel Whitereads’ casts of empty interiors of architectural interiors; Cornelia Parker engraving rings with the eleven days once lost from the English calendar. These practices share a concern with giving absence a physical presence, a negative space turned into something real and substantial. (Leader: 2008)
The works in The Social Life of Objects do something very similar by evoking what is abject, ugly, and uncomfortable in discarded objects and unifying the past meaning with present loss.
Hilary Jack most pointedly gives life and love to lost and abandoned objects, restoring them and most interestingly often returning them to where they became lost. A quiet sadness, dignified by compassion exists here and the possibility of failure after repair, tolerated. Broken Figurines repaired, shoes found at a bus stop mended (when its cheaper to buy new ones) polished and embossed with golden letters, trousers cleaned and pressed when they had been discarded in disgust in the road, a tennis racket repaired with macramé. The thought, the space occupied and vacated here is sophisticated and impressive, the more so for allowing successful reading in another cultural context, that of contemporay art in a public realm.
Lisa Penny enters the place of simulacra, of collaged meanings and signs, with motifs and wood cut out shapes linking images, experience and emotion. Here the mourning is of lost rituals and rites of passage: family; work and home, which provide the individual with unity. The promises of the 60’s: homes, machines for living in; feminism, liberating women’s work and sexuality; civil rights giving access to opportunities; technology giving the freedom of time. Her disregard for a very established trend of ‘retro’ within contemporary art , can confuse momentarily, as this work may look ‘retro’ but close inspection shows attempts to ‘marry’ actual fractured social and psychological states within a made object. Sourced from 60’s and 70’s domestic supplements the collages and structures link figurative and abstract images, with titles like ‘Lone thoughts’ and ‘waiting for something to happen’. ‘No Space’ deals with concepts of personal and physical space, governed by state and idealistic architectural visions of the 60’s. There is a parody and mourning active in this work, at disappointed promises and experience emptied of meaning with only an image remaining.
Mark Cousins in looking at stories and fantasies of destruction in modernity said ‘behind the optimism of the enlightenment has fallen the shadow of a distinctly modern relation to destruction, one which defines a contemporary melancholy’. He proposes to oppose such melancholy as well as guarding against optimism. (Cousins: 2008: Architectural Association lectures) Lisa’s vulnerable wood and cork built structures, contain I think, a similar proposal.
Dallas Seitz’s representation of myth in his objects is perhaps most straightforward. Using objects found or retrieved from family history, they bravely and sometimes elegantly take ugly objects and make sculptures that are totemic of stories or myths often taken from popular culture or National Geographic. For example a model used to imitate the Loch ness monster. His sculptures look like and borrow from anthropology and folk art and refer often to elements of nature, dead animals and body parts for example. Very physical emotions are evoked, revulsion at false teeth, discomfortable nostalgia for a politically incorrect doll ( a voodoo princess from his grandmothers’ bathroom) a mermaid, a cannibal head found in a children’s hospital and recreated to be a hunter, a logman troll, from the myth of a woman so desperate for a child, she had a log child.
From Descartes mind body split to a late capitalist 21c world of intense materiality and signs with no signifiers: economic failure, social and personal depression, environmental concerns, beliefs of magical realism, hold in common a crisis in materiality. The need for there to be more than desire redirected to objects. Lack, uselessness waste must be reconstituted.
There should be supermarkets that sell things and supermarkets that buy things back, and until that equalizes, they’ll always be more waste than there should be. … People should be able to sell their old cans, their old chicken bones, their shampoo bottles, their old magazines. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. (Andy Warhol: 1975:145)
Mary Douglas, in her book Purity and Danger, makes an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo in classification, which, reinforced by rituals of purity and impurity, create unity in experience. By these means, symbolic patterns are worked out and publicly displayed. Within these patters disparate elements are related and disparate experience is given meaning.’ (Douglas:1966:3) The works in this exhibition deal with loss, waste, abject bodies and myths that challenge the rational. In their different ways the artists take these lost and found objects and constitute a transformation that reminds us the meaning and lives of objects are themselves lost and found, bound, as they are, by unconscious processes and that their absence is as powerful as their presence.
Esther Windsor is a writer and curator. She is currently studying for a practice based phD at kingston University. Projects include "Bad Girls" ICA 1994, curation of The Citibank Prize and catalogue 1992-4 and her writing for Creative Camera.
Hilary Jack Artist of the Month Axis
Text by Ele Carpenter
I’ve just started teaching on the MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths and it seemed a perfect opportunity to invite the emerging curators on the course to search through Axis to find out about artists across the UK; Karen MacDonald quickly selected the artist and curator Hilary Jack.
Jack separates out her roles as artist and curator but still maintains continuity in her practice through her interest in subtly critiquing our relationship with material objects. Jack reinvents the meaning of the object within everyday life and public space. Her work spans a range of artistic and curatorial strategies interrogating patterns of consumption and re-use. In partnership with Paul Harfleet Jack co-curates Apartment in Manchester, as well as major events such as Transpennine08.
Reflecting on ethical tensions between object and environment she considers the problem of over-consumption and our never ending need for more stuff. By making profound but seemingly incidental interventions in the world, Jack salvages moments of humour and theatricality through the process of repairing discarded objects. Her ongoing ‘Make do and Mend' (2006) series involves what she describes as ‘socially interactive research’, humbly repairing and cleaning found objects' and returning them to the site where they were left. One such example is 'Yellow Car' (2006), a toy car left abandoned which Jack 'pimped' for the Extreme Craft Exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius (2007). Today the object lives on virtually through photos on flickr and the artists’ blog.
As well as an artist, Jack is an articulate online writer and her blog-style Work in progress pages on Axis give an insight into the role of artist-run and curatorially-driven spaces presenting work at the Buy Art Fair in Manchester (2008). Her recent figurine works subvert or modify the original artefact problematising its social codes and status as an art object with results that are both amusing and uncanny.
As the financial crisis unfolds, artists such as Jack have a number of resources at their disposal - from performative and re-use based art practice - to critical curating in domestic and public space. Perhaps most interestingly much of her work has an online counterpart. Her participation in the Photographers Gallery Plastic Bag Exhibition (2007) where she submitted a series of photographs entitled 'Turquoise Bag in a Tree' (2007) and the earlier work 'Glove' (2006), have now become part of the urban mythologies surrounding facebook and flickr. It will be interesting to see how she might utilise these memes further in the future.2
Ele Carpenter is a curator, artist and researcher based in Newcastle
[1]. Karen MacDonald is currently studying for an MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London. Before this she worked for several years in arts administration, coordination and arts development for organisations including Bath Area Network for Artists and NESA (North East Somerset Arts). Independent and self initiated projects have included coordination for Fringe Arts Bath Festival and peripatetic curatorial project South Central. She is currently working part time for Filmpro, an organisation that works with artists from marginalised groups who use digital media.
[2]. The term meme is used to describe the transmission and evolution of information. In this case specifically information transmitted via the internet, often utilising the most recent technology. An meme may stay the same or may evolve over time, by chance or through commentary, imitations, and parody versions, or even by collecting news accounts about itself.
Hilary Jack's artist profile
Hilary Jack's curator profile
Ele Carpenter's curator profile
Work in progress - Hilary Jack
www.apartmentmanchester.blogspot.com
www.photonet.org.uk
April 2009
The In Betweeness of Things:
Hilary Jack at Transition Gallery for E8, The Heart of Hackney
Amanda Ravetz
A pair of leather shoes on a bus stop bench, a torn football by a bin, a wooden tennis racquet propped against the wall. Jack’s matter-of-fact images evoke the journeys objects take towards obsolescence, suggesting an easy-come, easy-go attitude to mass-produced goods. And yet a melancholy hangs over these discarded bits of lives, evocative of human loss and of how the shedding of things leaves us strangely diminished. Once they are broken, we can no longer take them for granted; they disturb and unsettle us.
Jack not only photographs discarded and lost objects, she brings them back from the brink. The leather shoes have been repaired, polished and embossed with golden words. The football re-stitched and inflated. The racquet has been made fit for a new purpose, migrating from the street to the gallery.
At a time when local authorities in the UK are making the recycling of household waste compulsory, this work has a particular resonance. Local government websites explain the (complicated) arrangements residents must follow in sorting their waste into colour-coded boxes. They list the collection times, the types of vehicle and equipment that will remove the bottles, plastic and tins. Turning attention to more idiosyncratic items, Jack’s work also references the excesses of an economy based on built-in-obsolescence. And yet the very bathos of her gestures provokes the thought that recycling itself may be a futile action in the face of so much consumption and waste.
Indeed it is through the possibility of failure—the futility of the repairs carried out, the possibility that the replaced objects will not survive—that Jack’s work lodges its appeal. There is no guarantee that the things that have been cleaned or repaired and returned to the places where they were found will re-enter the social worlds they left. And so, cut adrift from their pasts, their futures uncertain, their very in-betweeness invites curiosity about their trajectories—and about other inanimate things.
Running through avant-garde theory is a strong belief in the purposelessness of art. The power of the aesthetic encounter lies in its freedom from instrumentality, evoking in turn a future free of human self-interest. By taking the everyday into the social world of art, the relationships surrounding objects are gently re-aligned, their purposes changed. Jack’s work causes utilitarian items to reveal a side of themselves beyond their practical usefulness, their original journeys, or the contexts of their use and abuse. The emblems of sociality that Jack adds in the forms of inscriptions, the other subtle interventions she makes, draw these ordinary objects into another aesthetic domain, and in so doing, insert a tiny pause between purpose and purposelessness.
When the door-closer ‘goes on strike’, says anthropologist Bruno Latour, we momentarily acknowledge its agency in our world. We speak bitter words when things let us down, investing the things around us with expectations, memory, frustration, hope. Objects are not human, but they are part of our social world.
At the heart of Hilary Jack’s work is a commitment to ‘the social life of things’. Her gathering and rehabilitation of lost or abandoned objects are less acts of altruism than statements of fact. Holding open the possibility that objects are (non-human) people, treating them as interlocutors, the artist momentarily defies the incommensurability between our world and theirs.
Dr. Amanda Ravetz is an AHRC Fellow at MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University where she is currently pursuing research into ‘Contemporary Convergence of Aesthetics and Ethnography'.