18 - 24 June 2010
‘In flagrante’ is Latin for ‘caught in the act’, a legal term used when someone has been found in the act of committing an offence. ‘Cathexis’ is a word defined in psychodynamics as the process of investing huge amounts of mental and emotional energy in a person, object or idea. In psychoanalysis, Freud defines the term cathexis in sexual terms, meaning the ‘libido’s charge of energy’.
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Collectors fill voids physically and metaphorically. The house today feels like a framed absence, filled with ghosts which inhabit the objects. Snippets of humour or evidence of madness transpire in the labelling and taxonomy, or was it truth: did he meet the queen’s servants; the NASA space team; Miss Muffet?
The house is packed to the roof with items. The space a collector occupies becomes a conceptual, enlarged, but displayed, sense of self. Fulfilment is never attained because the effect of acquisition constantly drains away on ownership.
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Mr. J. P. Tabiner was a man who lived a solitary life after his wife’s death in 1958. He was born in 1916 and died in 1989 after having spent 31 years with only his collections and fictitious scenarios for company. There were very few that knew John well enough to say what he spent his days doing but notes were taken by social services after Joan Tabiner's suspicious death:
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'JPT keeps busy pottering around the house making models
which he says are 'his salvation from a hostile world'. Concerns: Has
taken to sleeping on the living room
floor where he 'can look after the budgie'. Argumentative and uncompromising in nature however he appears to be compos mentis.'
Anon.
This installation was shown for Helen Allsebrook’s MA Printmaking Show at the School Of Creative Arts Degree Show 18-24 June 2010, UWE Bristol
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