translation - morse code text
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, hat 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 mirror.
The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh, page 29
four blind dates
Four Blind Dates was an exhibition curated by Robyn Backen at the Sanskriti Kendra Residency.
Purdah in the Kitchen is a development of work Backen produced this year for exhibition in Sydney and Brisbane. She used fibre optic as a modern material used in communication technology development. The space was contained within the obsolete language of morse coded purdah scenes. Language is the the underpinning of this work, a look at change in places of languages analogue V digital and how they inform one another.
interior - window - exterior
the space between two bodies
public art - audience - private art
Transparency transillumination; translucence, unobstructed vision; thinness, gauziness; limpidity, clearness; glassiness; vitreosity, hyalescence; hyaline, water, glass, lens, eyepiece; pane, shop window, gauze, lace, chifon (Roget’s Thesaurs)
brainfeed reference
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.
