There is a cave nestled between a taxidermist and a nail parlour on Islington's Essex Road. Garageland Reviewer Alicia Rodriguez ventures in and suffers a slight formal crisis (in a good way).
The cave is made up of ambiguous
substance. Our form is undetermined within the dark, damp spaces, although we
mostly think that we are solids. Our position is hard to define by just our own
edges or borders – it’s more complicated than that. Where does the earth stop
and our body begin? In Fixed Position, Flora Parrott has produced a
series of ‘3D diagrams’ in order to develop a study of fixity and sensation.
This study takes the form of an installation that mediates information and
space.
Tintype Gallery has been transformed into a disjointed cave structure
that maps Parrott’s experiments and evidence. Formlessness in relation to the
cave, but also to digital space, is a recurring idea. Within this there are
nods to the abject and anxious in a way that is harshly contemporary.
In Portal
Parrott has carefully smeared the gallery’s shop-front window with
blackboard paint save for a small square at the centre. The square becomes a screen, a portal through which to distinguish space that is real and space
that is immaterial. Before entering the exhibition we can use the small window
to be selective, to focus and to examine from the other side of the glass.
The Petar Caves in Brazil are central to this exhibition and their physicality occupies the gallery space. Parrott’s decision to visit these caves was rooted in an obsessive desire to define her surroundings as solid and unmoving, to make a firm distinction between the real and the virtual. What the resulting work actually represents is a continuous overlapping of the two, and a relationship between body and space that is not fixed, but always in the process of being formed.
Flora Parrott’s time in the caves has been documented through a
montage of print, sculpture and installation. Each piece is referred to as a
diagram, and this is an appropriate term – the work offers a tactile form
through which we can understand her experience in an almost academic
way. In order to 'articulate instinctive experiences' Parrott has used the
authority of field research and professional terminology to explore her own
compulsions.
Each work informs the next and the theme of 'uncertainty' is eloquently
approached. Stalagmite Sculpture, a thin column made up of photocopies,
a screenprint, a steel rod and a mound of gritty black sand, is a particularly
striking piece that is fragmented in its nature but that constitutes a single, fixed
form. Stalagmites are in a state of constant metamorphosis, and Parrott's choice of material reflects this process.
Parrott’s fascination with her boundaries
manifests within large prints of her own body breaching surfaces. These, in
turn, become spatial and part of an object. Push Through is a pair of
C-prints mounted on steel and grounded by rocks. One image depicts full
submersion in liquid, the other an inability to reach beneath the surface at
all.
Some laser prints are taped directly to the floor and recall a sense of
scatter-brained research, joined up only by tactility and strong sensory
allusions. Alongside acute arrangements of bones, metal and piles of black
sand, the immediacy of the images is powerful; I feel as if I could sink into
the ground.
Fixed Position has the effect of a visual essay. Loaded with ideas and bodily
experiences, it is geography, geology and biology as unraveled by fine art
preoccupations. The black plaited
ropes that run throughout the space are a symbol of these joined-up ideas, providing a constant reminder of the malleable,
formless sensation that Parrott is desperate to understand. They cascade into
the viewer’s peripherals at every angle, drawing lines between fragments of
thought.
We are lucky to catch a glimpse into Parrott’s
earth-science musings, a state that is not really fixed at all, but
travelling between solid and virtual. The 'cave' has facilitated a dialogue for
work that, by its very nature, represents a process. I am interested in reading
this exhibition now, but also anticipate its metamorphosis, the next form it
takes and the next position.
Alicia Rodriguez
Flora Parrott: Fixed Position
12 March - 19 April 2014
Tintype Gallery, London N1
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