Over the past few months I have been collecting a growing range of objects/materials from the beach, mostly those which I feel in some way challenge the distinction between an object and a material, and also those that blur the boundaries between what we might define as ‘man-made’ and ‘natural’. This began last November after I watched The Wrecking Season by Nick Darke which led to me starting to collect my own ‘wreckage’ in a similar way. What to do with these collected materials is an ongoing process. I want to draw attention to their ambiguous liminal statuses between human and nonhuman, object and material, without necessarily being too explicit or definitive. Although I have played around with creating sculptures and drawings from them previously, here I took inspiration from Cornelia Parker’s Neither From Nor Towards wherein she simply displays a selection of sea-worn bricks from houses that have fallen into the sea from cliff erosion. In this way Parker lets the materials do the talking, her role becoming one of mediation and curation rather than of creating anything herself. I have also looked at Susan Hiller’s From the Freud Museum as another example of a curatorial piece.
As opposed to these examples this series of images captures more of a process of experimentation rather than anything in a final form. I enjoy their playfulness and the way the various groupings suggest different ways we might think to categorise them: by material, origin, shape, texture, size, colour, or something more intangible. The photos towards the end I feel are particularly playful, almost starting to become reminiscent of landscapes or forms beyond their constituent parts. This reminds me a little of the work of Max Ernst in the way that larger, organic abstract forms grow out of smaller ones, seeming to spill into representational but never quite resolving into something nameable.
My photography:
Anna Harris 