bookmark item

This folded item was first used as a bookmark whilst reading Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway during the first Covid lockdown. It has been exhibited with a related folded piece entitled ‘Open Letter’ and the video that can be viewed below. ‘Open Letter’ has been sold but this item is still at work bookmarking pages 106-107 of the Tantra catalogue.

Exhibition statement: My folded drawings can be included in art exhibitions. There’s always a small hole punched in one corner from which it is possible to hang them on a wall. Very few are rectangular and so each one dangles in an unpredictable way. The effect is awkward, as if the drawing doesn’t really want to be exhibited. It doesn’t – the primary experience is in the action of unfolding and refolding. I got this idea from the mysterious Tantric diagrams one sometimes comes across in UK museums. These were folded because, having been created as magic charms, they were kept privately about the person rather than openly displayed. Another influence was Laura Marks’ essay A Noisy Brush with the Infinite (2015), which also explores the aesthetics of ‘enfolding-unfolding’.

Exhibition statement: I make short videos too. This one documents what happened as I worked on the drawings I’ve submitted to the Northern Lights exhibition. You hear lots of ambient noise and encounter my connection-building during lockdown. For example, an article in the Times Literary Supplement made me re-read Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. Some of what passed through Clarissa Dalloway’s mind that June day nearly a century ago was triggered by the 1918 influenza pandemic. As I folded up my drawings for this project, Woolf’s stream of consciousness haunted every move I made.