robyn backen

He said to me once that
...one could never know anything except through desire,
real desire,
which was not the same as greed or lust: a pure painful and primitive desire,
a longing for everything that was not in oneself,
a torment of the flesh,
that carried one beyond the limits of one's mind to other times and other places,
if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and
one's image in the mirrror.

The Shadow Lines
by Amitav Ghosh
page 29

Purdah in the Kitchen
Brainfeed,Lewers Bequest, Penrith
1999 - 2003
Wood, DVD and lights

This work was constructed in 1999 during an Asialink residency at Sanskriti Kendra in Delhi, India. The Morse code text panels, in original work, were set into the large windows situated at either end of the studio residence. This 2003 incarnation of Purdah in the Kitchen is a reconstruction that substitutes artificial light sources for the daylight of the Delhi exhibition. In my work I commonly use light with the integrative patterns of language to build works that engage with physical space. My work evokes changes in flow in a space, such as tidal change or the sending of a light message across the space. I use different languages, codes and signals to understand or comprehend our physical world.