About the work
I play with text, images, and narrative. Work often manifests as low-cost publications, short moving pieces and/or web-based objects.
I’ve long been obsessed with language, value systems, and our Western insistence that language exists outside and separate from matter, which, perhaps due to training as an actor in the early 90s, never rang true to me. In the framework I subscribe to, language (what we say) and material (bodies that say stuff) are fundamentally inseparable, except through our habitual desire to separate aspects of life, then apply value to different realms. AI enters my work, along with photography, scribbles and digital doodles, since it too is a manifestation of the reality of which we are a part, and shouldn’t be ignored or dismissed. I also play with other media, including paper, text, image, speech and voice, to name a few others.
As we live through a linguistic/techno/scientific revolution, we fear all, including ourselves, will be reduced to a soup of undifferentiated slop. This fear seems to leave us feeling untethered, prone to paranoia and at times, apparently resistant to reason. But also brings experimentation with form, allowing us to address systems and modalities that need overturning and/or reconfiguring. Straight dichotomies that many took for granted no longer look so certain, despite voices insisting on the opposite. In a universe underpinned by digital ‘scribing’ systems, ancient absence and presence are usurped by pattern, coherence <-> decoherence, and movement. As such, my work addresses the potentials and risks of these shifts. It is neither practice nor theory-led, which remains in the realm of ‘either/or’ logic that has long seemed sensible and fair to many, but which I reject. The inquiries on these pages are examples of ongoing, entangled, embodied discovery that come about through my obsessions with the feminine and contemporary media’s influence, constitution or destruction (often simultaneous) of our world. I aim to celebrate and exploit the dissolution of entrenched binaries and dualisms within a symbolic realm that feels dangerously unstable and/or wonderfully fluid, depending on your point of view and tolerance for opposing tensions and/or acceptance of ‘superposition’ *. However, I also acknowledge and worry about resulting instability and loss of collective ground, even though much of that ground can seem redundant, if not antediluvian to some of us. As I work through paradoxes and philosophical conundrums, I do my utmost to avoid negative nostalgia, nihilism and sanctimony, holding on to empathy for all I’m worth. (Of course, I frequently fail. Nevertheless, empathy and a commitment to pluralism, underpinned by dialogue and listening, sit at the core of my project. Listening sometimes entails hearing, not to what is voiced, but to what isn’t.)
Influenced by Maya Deren’s call to discover a new language for film in the 1930s and 40s, in the 21st century, I embrace an expanded definition of 'the image', encompassing optical, sonic, and haptic elements (Nail, 2019). I categorically reject accepted media hierarchies. Poetry can be made with anything, even shit. So far, I’ve avoided literal shit but will mix various materials – from tinfoil, film, and textiles to AI-generated content and organic matter – while rejecting received wisdom about the value of this or that medium over another. This results in projects that aim to traipse across and through boundaries, manifesting simultaneously in print, online, or installation, with image, text and performance. Nevertheless, I heed Hannah Arendt’s warning in Truth and Politics; beware of images made in the mechanised (and now automated) world, however they come into being.
*A term borrowed from quantum mechanics by François Laurelle and subsequently Katarina Kolozova to describe the way opposing forces can exist together while transforming each other, i.e. deeply entangled.
Books/articles that inform the work:
Arendt, H. (1968). 'Truth and Politics', in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Enlarged edition. New York: Viking Press, pp. 227-264.
Buber, M. (2002). Between Man and Man. Translated by R. G. Smith. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203220092.
Deren, M. (1946). An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. New York: The Alicat Book Shop Press.
Gamble, C.N., Hanan, J.S. and Nail, T. (2019) ‘WHAT IS NEW MATERIALISM?’, Angelaki, 24(6), pp. 111–134. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1684704.
Hayles, N.K. (2017) Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago (Ill.): University of Chicago Press.
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kirby, V. (2011). Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kolozova, K. (2017). ‘Philosophy as capitalism and the socialist radically metaphysical response to it’, Labyrinth, 19(2), pp. 57–66.
Nail, T. (2019). Theory of the Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press.