Wrinkle of Earth

Overview

The media I explore have certain things in common. They are sourced from my immediate environment. They have been put to intense human use. They are thought to have lost value. They are ignored,discarded or thrown away. They all have something to do with food consumption. To me, their provenance imbues or charges them with history and content, which I seek to explore in order to highlight certain conditions of mankind’s existence, as well as his relationship with himself and the environment. I therefore try to bring these objects back, to present them again in ways which seem to make them confront their former lives and the lives of those who have used them. Among these media, I count the old wooden mortars I worked with in the 1980s, broken pots, and old metal graters.

My engagement with the mortars sought to raise these objects to the vertical – in real use they are laid horizontally and violently rammed into – in an attempt metaphorically to empower them to stand up in order to see and be seen.

My broken pots series explored the idea of the inevitability of death, breaking, delapidation – not as ends in themselves but as conditions for renewal, new birth, just as rotting seeds sprout new plants .
Old rusty metal graters which I configured into expansive walls were constructs which, rather than hide, sequester or erase, revealed presences because of the intense curiosity they generated: when walls obstruct views the other senses (including imagination) tend to probe deeper.

The work for this biennial can be looked at from two perspectives: the medium and the process. Liquor bottle- tops to me represent the collective soul of the bottles of schnapps, rum, gin etc., which were brought to my continent several centuries ago, ostensibly by traders to establish a bridge between peoples, and their links with the infamous transatlantic triangular trade and subsequent impoverishment of parts of the earth. The process, consisting of manually and individually ripping, rolling, crumpling, twisting, folding, bending and piercing these tops and stitching them into a large continuous sheet, not only attempts to valorise an evolutionary pace of doing things but also references the commonalisation and cheap rating of labour – human labour, over the greater part of the planet.

Wrinkle Of The Earth could be saying several things, or is probably just a scroll essaying themes of permeation, binding, yoking, opulence, bleakness: the textures, patterns and complexions of the globe, resulting from age-long human actions and interactions.


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 8.