WEEK 5 - 348 WEST 22ND ST. APT. A, NEW YORK, NY 10011 AT RODEN GALLERY, SEOUL /TOKYO OPERA CITY OF ART GALLERY/ SERPENTINE GALLERY, LONDON /BIENNALE OF SYDNEY,, SEOUL, TOKYO, LONDON SYDNEY, 2000-2001 , DO HO SUH; ROGER KEMP

MEMORY. MATERIAL. 

Do Ho Suh is a South Korean artist who explores concepts such as displacement, time, personal space and home through using material as memory, and vice versa. The sight visits to the children's bamboo garden and the ceiling of the Great Hall at NGVI, are both examples of other ways of provoking memory through the use of material.

At the Royal Melbourne Botanical Gardens, - Children’s Bamboo Garden, one is eased into relaxation through the control of the forest to create an interoperated shelter. In this state ones imagination can drift more easily into daydream. It being a children’s garden, I unconsciously drifted from stressed university student into a more childlike mindset.

The ceiling of the great hall at NGVI is similar in that it alters ones state of mind, and allows the imagination to relate the ceiling to memories. Personally my imagination drifted to churches, and my memories in them, as well as to warmer memories, due to the warmth of the light leaking through the glass.

My visual response for this week draws mainly from Do-Ho Suhs interests in ‘the specificity and the movability of space’ and his exploration into the ‘structure of the personal space and the possibility and impossibility of such individualised space”1 Do-Ho Suhs interest in how space can travel with a person both physically ( “clothing/ house”) and mentally (“space of memory”) as well the “boundaries between one and the other and between one and the many”.

My work is a model of a personal space tent, or refuge. I chose to make the tent out of typical curtain material, due to its sheer nature, its obvious alternative use and the way it reminds me personally of the dappled light of both the children’s garden and the glass ceiling at NGVI.  I see the tent being used when one needs a place to escape and daydream. The tent is easily transportable and so ties into the ideas expressed in 348 WEST 22^nd ST., APT. A, NEW YORK, NY 10011..., and the works ability to be folded into a suitcase. My choice of sheer fabric, apposed to opaque, allows the tent to be a suggestion of refuge, rather than offering any real protection; Accentuating the ‘barely there’ nature of personal space and memory. The slightly laced curtain material may evoke memories of specific houses or homes.  

1(Do Ho Suh in lui, J, ‘Do-Ho Suh’ in E McDonald (ed), Biennale of Sydney,  Sydney: Biennale of Sydney, 2002, catalogue for the 13^th Biennale of Sydney: (the world may be) fantastic, pp. 209-12)